Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 October 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee On Key Issues Affecting The Traveller Community

Traveller Mental Health: Discussion (Resumed)

Photo of Colette KelleherColette Kelleher (Independent)
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The committee will produce its interim report shortly. It would be timely, as the Minister of State said, to feed that into the discussions on the allocations of the €39 million. Clearly there is a crisis, and this is borne out in all the evidence the committee has heard, and we have only scratched the surface in terms of the numbers of people we have been able to hear from directly and from the many submissions we have received. We would welcome a commitment by the Minister of State that the interim findings of the committee will feed directly into that process for 2020. People are dying and we cannot wait. There is an urgency to take action in this area.

Traveller organisations say the establishment of a national Traveller mental health steering group would be important and would like to see the development of a national Traveller mental health strategy within the strategy. It is not a case of either-or but to do both within the allocation of the resources we have been talking about. Will the Minister of State give a commitment regarding the recommendations of the report of this committee feeding directly into what will happen in 2020, and not pushing them out into the future, given the immediacy of the crisis upon us?