Professor Michael O'Flaherty:

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I am very grateful for the invitation. As the Cathaoirleach said, I was elected as the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights six months ago. Since then I have been clear that one of my top priorities in the role will be supporting the human rights of members of the Roma and Traveller communities. We are speaking about 12 million people across the 46 member states of the Council of Europe. I am on a set of missions to eight countries to get a deeper understanding of the diverse lived experiences, with a view to informing my engagement not only with those Governments but throughout the Council of Europe to do a better job of standing up for the human rights of these 12 million people who, typically, are pushed to the very edges of our societies. I have been in Ireland all week in this capacity and I have spent time in Dublin and Limerick. I am in Dublin today, and tomorrow I will visit Dóchas in Mountjoy.

I want to share some preliminary views. I will not call them more than that. I will issue a statement next week, and in a few weeks I will submit to the Government a memorandum containing more detail.

If the committee will allow them, these are preliminary observations. I felt it would have been a shame to miss the opportunity to engage with the committee.

One of the great resources we can count on is the leadership shown by Traveller women. Everywhere I have been this week, they have had the ideas, energy and strategies. In many cases, they are not sufficiently supported and empowered to lead the change on which they are clear. I have also been very impressed by young people. I met young people from Athlone who are doing important work with their peers around issues such as mental health. These are capacities we should be encouraging.

The National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy II, NTRIS II, is to be welcomed. It is wide ranging and hits all the right sectors. It is accompanied by various sectorial plans. The issue now is implementation. The on-paper planning is very good, but we must see it delivered and do everything that is possible, including resourcing its implementation.

I am Irish so I think I can talk about "us" when I make the following remarks. We tolerate a degree of racism in our society which we have to call out. It is a casual racism. I do not think it is evil but it is so deep that we are not fully aware of the extent to which it affects how we act and react. Attitudes towards Travellers, anti-Gypsy sentiment and other related matters are bred from that casual racism. That is not just my impression. These are the repeated findings of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, which I used to lead.

In the context of casual racism, there is also a breakdown in trust with the Garda. One side says one thing and the other says another thing, but the fact is that the trust is very poor, which leads to many issues and problems. There is very high perception in the Travelling community that there is ethnic profiling. The figures found in the access to justice research carried out by the University of Limerick are almost identical to the figures for the perception of ethnic profiling found by my former agency, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. That cannot be a coincidence. There is much we can do to build that trust. A lot of work could be done with and within the Garda to build awareness and appreciation of the lived reality of Travelling communities and to promote cultural awareness and sensitivity. There is a practical issue. We would welcome it if the Garda were to disaggregate its gathered data by ethnicity so we can, once and for all, specify Traveller-related issues in a way that is not currently the case due to the lack of an ethnic disaggregation.

I will move to education. It is important to get behind the undramatic concept of the reduced timetable and to appreciate that, in effect, it means no education. How an earth can you get an education if you are only in school for an hour or two at most per day? A massively disproportionate number of Traveller children are subject to a reduced timetable compared with others in the community. That indicates there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

The mental health situation of the Traveller community needs to be addressed as the crisis that it is. We celebrated Traveller Suicide Awareness Day this week. I went to a cemetery in Limerick and unveiled a plaque beside a tree that the Travelling community got permission to plant in the graveyard as a testament to those who have died by suicide. One in 11 deaths in that community is caused by suicide. That needs to be addressed as the urgent crisis that it is. There are many things that could be done and it is not an insurmountable issue. When I asked Travelling communities the single most useful thing that could be done, the answer was to resource Traveller women to do mental health work in their communities. That is a practical suggestion.

I will move to the issue of accommodation and housing, to which I know the committee devotes considerable attention. I emphasise the importance not only of fixing the housing situation but also of making sure that housing is culturally appropriate. I have got into trouble previously for defending the normality and correctness of allowing a Traveller who wants a horse to have a horse. That is a part of the culture. A few times this week in conversations with people from the non-Traveller community, I noted that the horse is understood as a problem and not as a positive expression of identity. That must be sorted out. We need culturally appropriate housing and must not deal with accommodation in some generic way as we would with the general community and population.

I will say a word on the Roma. Roma and Travellers are two different communities and it is important not to homogenise them as if they are the same and require the same solutions. The Roma situation needs close attention. There has been exponential growth in the population of migrant Roma in recent years. When I most recently looked at the situation, which was approximately two years ago, the official figure was 5,000. Today, the figure is 15,000 or 16,000. That is enormous growth. There are real and pressing issues, one of which relates to language. We must never forget, as we seek to support and respect the rights of these people, that a considerable number of them cannot speak English. They have enormous difficulty in accessing services. There are also issues of access to the welfare system, including in the context where many people do not have the necessary documentation. They are, in effect, stateless. That has been the experience, we are told, of a number of Ukrainian Roma who have come here in recent times.

It is encouraging that this committee exists. I express my deep respect and appreciation for its work. It is more necessary than ever that parliamentarians hold all of the actors accountable for their responsibilities, including for the delivery of the ambitious goals identified in the strategies, and maintain the necessary pressure to address the issues systematically and in a time-bound fashion. Realistically speaking, the number of Travellers who will ever be Members of these Houses will always be modest. If there is no committee of this type, there is little guarantee that the voices of the Traveller and Roma communities will be sufficiently heard where decisions are made.