Mr. Patrick Reilly:

I work with Travellers on the ground. When it comes to accessing services, what I hear is that they are not meeting Travellers where they are at. Travellers have low levels of educational attainment; things like filling in forms and reading and writing can be enough to make them walk away. We must be respectful and mindful that what might work for one community might not work for another. As the primary health care and mental health care workers throughout Ireland, these are the things we are trying to do to work with the services to help them to identify this. I will give a brief example. I know a Traveller man whose postman had issues in entering his site. As a result, he was missing hospital appointments. As far as the hospital was concerned, he was not turning up. It is these things that are missed and we are there to highlight them. It was not the case that the Traveller man had not bothered to turn up; it was just that the postman would not enter the site because there were too many dogs or he did not want to do so. We are still living with that experience today. There are sites all across Ireland that still have it today and we are trying to highlight it for services.