Ms Brigid Quirke:

In terms of the political question - and I mean political with a small "p" - they are a small community. The first report on Travellers was carried out in 1965. The first Traveller health study was carried out in 1986. Since then the gap in life expectancy for Traveller men has gone from ten times the differential with the general population to 15 times. Things are deteriorating. That is also indicative of the improvement within the settled community, but the gap is widening. The Traveller situation has been under discussion. There have been policy documents and discussions, but over 50 years later we are no further on. Indeed, we are in a worse situation. Do people not want this to happen? We have all the reports, the evidence and the actions. We write submissions every day on policy documents. We lobby and we try to make sure that the Traveller voice is heard, but as Mr. Reilly said, if Travellers are not actually at the table it is as if they do not exist. It is not appropriate to have someone sitting at every table, but that is what it seems to require.

We had a person who tried to get elected as a Senator. That person sought to apply through the Taoiseach's panel. They then tried the university panel. There were four unsuccessful attempts to try to get a Traveller elected to the Seanad via the Trinity panel. We have one councillor in Tuam because there is a very large population of Travellers there. That is about the only political representation we have. We looked at models in other countries, in terms of the Traveller health study, and found that 40,000 people actually makes up a constituency. Is there a rationale for saying that Travellers should be allowed representation when the totality of their population is taken into consideration?