Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee On Key Issues Affecting The Traveller Community

Traveller Employment: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Hugh Friel:

There were a good few questions. First, the quality of outcome for members of the Traveller community is no more than for the settled community in terms of employment. Second, not all Travellers are job-ready. There are different pathways to employment and there are some people at the bottom of the stairs, others in the middle and some at the top. It is a question of how we can create the conditions through community development to get the people from the bottom to the top of the stairs.

The Senator alluded to the point about the local authority and not holding up Travellers, and I point out that we have employed three Travellers. On the platform that needs to be built for the Traveller community, to which Ms Quilligan and others alluded, role models need to be created within the community and that has to be transparent throughout the country.

We ran a mental health conference on 15 November, to which I referred in the submission. We had 43 men in attendance, including two settled men who were Traveller workers, one from Sligo and one I brought in from the mental health services to talk about suicide and mental health. I was trying to get them to understand the social determinants and what affects people's health, education, employment and inequality. I asked how many in the room had passed their leaving certificate and only one person said, "Yes". I asked how many had passed their junior certificate and the same person was the only one, and he was sitting beside me. There were four employed, one from Sligo, myself and two of the workers from Donegal Travellers Project out of the 44 people in the room, and nobody else stood up. It was shocking for me to think, on a human level, that this was the case in my community. Even driving the car up this morning, I was thinking how many Travellers are driving to work this morning, given we see thousands of people doing their commute to work every morning.

Cultural awareness training and information around the Traveller community are needed because people are sometimes ignorant of these matters and they can be blinded by racially motivated discrimination and a sense that Travellers are inferior to the settled community. The ignorance of people towards Travellers leads to inaccuracies in their perceptions of them. A lot of members of the settled community never meet a Traveller, never engage with a Traveller and never have a conversation with a Traveller. Stereotypical and negative views are portrayed through the media, family resources, friends or associates in the workplace. There is much work to be done on cultural awareness and building relationships. Relationships are crucial to getting to a stage where Travellers who are in employment are not hiding their identity but are proud of who they are. As Ms Quilligan has alluded to, there are Travellers in employment who are hiding their identity. I spoke to a man who is in a high position in his workplace who is hiding his identity and he said his life would be hell if he revealed that he is a member of the Travelling community. He did not want to express that, even though he is as a role model in his profession. There are Travellers who are in the position of role models but they have to hide their identities because of society and recent profiling. I mention the Aboriginals and the Native Americans. We have an overpopulation of Travellers within the prison system. Why is that? We must look at the low levels of attainment in education and employment. People have to buy their bread and butter, as was alluded to. There are a lot of mechanisms that need to be changed and put in gear to change the circumstances and the platforms that exist.