Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the Commissioner. I listened with interest to what he had to say. I agree that the women are to the forefront and lead within the Traveller community. Anybody who works with Travellers would recognise that. They need support and opportunities. However, I must say that it compounds women's problems that there are enormous issues facing the male population. There are huge mental health issues and we all know that the interrelationships between people are far more strained where there are mental health issues. We are also aware that research has shown that people who do not have an occupation suffer higher morbidity and higher mortality, and suffer from mental health issues.

We know that activity is quite an effective cure for that. Will Professor O'Flaherty be looking at the impact that the demise of traditional occupations for male Travellers has had on the mental health of men, in particular? As he knows, traditionally many Travellers married young. In the past, women tended to be rearing families, if you go back far enough, and the income was earned by the men. When you take away the occupation of men in any society, you effectively are creating a mental health timebomb, just as you would be if you took away the useful occupation of women. Will Professor O'Flaherty be looking at that issue? To say that this is not an issue that is affecting women is to ignore the reality of the dynamics within communities and families. I have always believed there is a huge untapped wealth of inherited experience among male Travellers that we are not harnessing. We have not looked at creative new ways to harness it. They were always good at trading. They were good at recycling until the paperwork became the issue. All sorts of things got closed down. How much is it intended to look at that issue in parallel with the effects it is having on women Travellers?

Professor O'Flaherty mentioned housing. If plans built houses, not only would we have built accommodation, but we would have built castles for everybody. We have county plans, joint committees and so on. I know that if you go to County Galway, you will find that a lot of Travellers are housed in standard accommodation and are on the list in the normal way. We have a large number of Travellers whose preference is that. My attitude always is that if somebody comes into my constituency office, I will try to facilitate their preferences, but I try to make the preferences equal. In other words, you can tell someone that they have a choice, but in reality you can eliminate choice because one might be an immediate expectation and the other might be a long-distance expectation. Lots of Travellers have grown up in settled housing having never experienced living in caravans or Traveller-specific accommodation - in some cases, their parents have never experienced it - and I find that some of them want to live in an estate where there is a large number of Travellers, and some want to live far away from such estates. That happens to every group in society.