Mr. Brian Dillon:

I will go through the Deputy's questions. Ms Casey may wish to respond to the questions on a particular local authority and on education and mental health. There is an interesting history to Cena in that it probably took about five years to convince at policy level that there was a need for recognising. The notion of an approved housing body is itself a recognition, in principle, that the particular needs of particular sections of the population can be met by a legally structured, established approved housing body. That argument was won thanks to Ms Casey and many of her people who fought for it for years.

To answer the question directly, Cena has only been existence in a full-time capacity for about three years. The Deputy is right to comment on how far we have got. We probably shocked ourselves in how far we have gone with that in three years. We are very confident in the model we are building. The Deputy spoke about problems with local authorities. That is day-to-day existence for us. It is also a serious educational process all around. We have battles and all sorts of differences around how things are interpreted and seen. However, we are demonstrating that this can be done and there are different ways of approaching it. The Deputy gave as an example the question of whether people have to be separated or split up. No, they do not. Do people have to be forced into urban areas or the edges of urban environments when they do not want to move to them? No, they do not. Can people have aspects of their culture without the world falling down? Yes, they can. We have proved we can be very clear what these are, both within legislation and compliance and in other areas. Our work is slow in the sense that we are working through local authorities one by one, authority but we are demonstrating that this can be done when Travellers are centrally involved in the process and given that control. It is probably a long process.

Just on the local authority question, the support we are now being given by the Department provides for a specific process on bringing our model to local authorities. We will have one worker and a complete programme to demonstrate across one county how this actually operates, including how we do the needs assessment correctly, how we get homes built and properties acquired and how we set up those working relationships with the Traveller community. We will then extend that across Ireland. I believe we will have a major part to play in redefining what is the Traveller accommodation programme, TAP, or what should be there instead of these programmes. That is a work in progress but we never expected it to be an easy journey. It took a long time to create this problem so we know it will be built block on block.

The Deputy raised a very important point on mental health and all the corresponding issues. We have trained people from the Traveller community who work in their own community to assess needs but also set up Traveller-to-Traveller relationships in terms of managing properties and looking to future generations and building their own community with them. We found very early that it is impossible for people to be fully trained in that capacity without knowing a great deal about mental health issues and the issues Mr. Stanley from the Simon Communities mentioned, namely, the day-to-day discrimination people are facing and the link between that daily discrimination and mental health and rates of suicide.

There are things happening. We work very closely with the National Traveller Mental Health Network. It is holding a major event County Mayo tomorrow and we will participate in that. We connect with the network. As the Simon Communities mentioned, these things are not possible for one agency. It is about connecting and opening up. We also work consistently with the Traveller Counselling Service. We know we cannot deal with accommodation in isolation but it is not possible to address any of these other issues without first looking at accommodation. As Ms Casey said, people are living in Third World conditions. We address that issue first but we also try to work on the issues around it.

Down the road, as we are reconstructing dwellings and doing buy-and-renew in rural areas, we have young Travellers already working for us at a more unskilled level. We want Traveller contractors to come in and do this work, and we are building on that. We want apprenticeships in the more skilled areas of kitchen fitting. We have all that as a programme. I fully agree that accommodation is only one element. We are starting there and trying to build the other elements around it.

I do not know if I misrepresented the local authority issue because it is kind of a mixed bag for us.