Dr. Sheila Cannon:

I thank the Chairman. It is a pleasure to be here. I am very impressed by the data presented by my colleagues and their expertise on barriers to employment faced by the Traveller community. I have the lucky job of having a positive story to tell, but it is a useful example of one of the ways we can address these massive challenges.

I am assistant professor of social entrepreneurship in the Trinity business school. Members are probably wondering what I am doing here.

It is a completely different context. My area is social enterprise, which has been part of social policy in Europe since the early 1990s and has addressed issues of unemployment, in particular in areas where there are major barriers to employment such as multigenerational unemployment and marginalised groups that are discriminated against, including people who have been incarcerated or have experienced periods of homelessness. There are various situations in which people might find barriers to employment that are more systemic than individual.

This summer a new policy for social enterprise in Ireland was launched. We advised on how best to roll that out, under the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Michael Ring. A national conference on social enterprise in Ireland was held in November. While there is a rich and active social enterprise sector here, there is a lack of data and we do not quite know what the numbers are. Benefacts is a database of civil society organisations. A search for Traveller organisations on it shows there are just over 5,000, but they are not all social enterprises. They include various community groups and other groups of all kinds. The database includes small community type groups as well as larger NGOs.

Some mapping exercises have taken place to try to determine what kind of social enterprises are in existence, but there is no overall picture. Beyond that, we are not sure of the impact of social enterprise on a macro level and how effective the policies are. We have data from other countries which show that social enterprise is an effective strategy for dealing with issues of unemployment as part of social policy. However, we do not yet have many data on that for Ireland. We hope to develop that.

I have been a board member of Shuttle Knit, a social enterprise that employs Traveller women in Wicklow town. It was founded in 2001 and I joined last month. I am fairly new to the area, although I have worked with other Traveller organisations over the years as I was involved in the non-profit sector for 12 years. I have since moved on to academia to study non-profit organisations.

The purpose of Shuttle Knit is to support Traveller women in Wicklow town through employment. It builds on their existing skills of knitting and embroidery. It employs 12 women, ten from the Travelling community and two from the settled community. It is a partnership. One of the benefits is that it was founded by the Wicklow Travellers Group, with an understanding of the barriers to employment. It is located in a community centre owned and run by the Wicklow Travellers Group. It is very much a safe space where people from the Traveller community can go knowing that they will not be discriminated against. As we heard in the other submissions today, discrimination is a major problem.

Through their experience at Shuttle Knit, the women take part in various training opportunities. They can take part in literacy training and training specific to the work they are doing, such as digitalised embroidery. All of the crests for schools and sports clubs in the area are now done by Shuttle Knit. The women work with shops on the high street to get orders for crests, which is a source of employment. The training on the digital part of the process is an added aspect, rather than just doing embroidery.

I will outline another specific example of one of the benefits of the project. The women in Shuttle Knit recently took part in an initiative which did not specifically come from the project, namely, an international excursion to Lourdes. It may sound unrelated to social enterprise or not important, but it was of significant benefit to the women, many of whom had never been on an aeroplane before. Many had never travelled outside the country and several got passports for the first time. It shows the empowering effect of being part of an organisation where women are employed and have skills.

There are different ways to classify social enterprise. One is the relationship between the mission and revenue generation.

Shuttle Knit is mission-centred. That means that the means of generating revenue is the same as the mission, as opposed to a charity shop run by a cancer charity, which is not related to the mission but exists to raise funding. The advantage of having the mission as the means of generating revenue is that it is very empowering for the people involved. That might be a subtle distinction but it is quite a significant one when categorising social enterprises.

Regarding capacity building, we find a difference between generations. Some of the women who were first employed there are learning and advancing their skills in knitting. That is not necessarily training them for future employment. For them to have this experience is beneficial in itself. They are part of a community and they can take part in literacy training and other events. Moreover, their daughters see them employed. That has an intergenerational knock-on effect. We cannot judge the impact of social enterprise merely based on whether it trains people to enter the mainstream labour market. In some cases the answer is "No", and that is fine. We have to look at the longer-term impact. There is no massive hand-knitting industry in Ireland. We are not training people to work in knitting companies or to be their CEOs.