Ms Cliodhna O'Neill:

The Deputy referenced the action plan on bullying, which comes under the umbrella term, Cineáltas. The Minister published that on 1 December 2022 and it is a unique programme. It is new in that it is one of the first programmes - I think globally - to take the UNESCO whole education approach to prevent and address bullying. The principles of that are prevention, support, oversight and community. There are 61 actions in Cineáltas and we are working through those at the moment. However, a really important point about Cineáltas, which I referenced earlier, is how much it was informed by the experiences of children and young people. When we were doing the consultations with children and young people, at a certain point we realised we did not have sufficient Traveller voice in that consultation so we specifically went out to find that. We were running consultations supported by our colleagues in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, and in Hub na nÓg and more than one specific consultation with Traveller children was held to ensure we caught those voices. There was very rich data and information from there about their experiences that fed into the overall Cineáltas programme. At the moment, where we are with Cineáltas is updating the anti-bullying procedures for schools, which needed to be updated, and we are quite close to the end of that work. It is going to take a little bit of time to finish that off but again, it has been a huge consultation process and again, the voices of Traveller children and young people, and the voices of Travellers more generally, have been key to the development of those. What that will provide is a new set of procedures for schools to use in their own anti-bullying work but it is all rooted in this whole-of-education approach, which recognises the importance of family, community, student experience and so on. There are specific actions within Cineáltas that relate to the Traveller community and those are being working through at present as part of that. When we see the Traveller and Roma education strategy, Cineáltas also will be knitted through that because it is part of our approach to well-being within schools. The Minister has said multiple times that schools are fundamentally and should be places of welcome for everyone and this is one of the methods by which we are trying to ensure that happens. However, those voices and capturing those voices was incredibly important.