Mr. Thomas McCann:

Absolutely. The visiting teachers service was there to try to bridge the gap between families and schools. Unfortunately that was just cut. It was just taken away. Nothing was put in to replace that to bridge that gap between the families and the schools. That has been looked at again and again to put something in there to address the difficulties the families have, including the historical educational difficulties they have in terms of helping people, but also around the evictions and having people move on.

Coming back to the young people, there is a very high percentage of younger Travellers in the Oberstown campus. I agree that in order to avail of the services you need to be identified as a problem, but for Travellers there are no supports in place for that. There are no supports for a lot of younger Travellers. They do not get the opportunity to engage with a lot of supports. Many of them are ending up in Oberstown.

Regarding what Mr. Collins and Mr. McCarthy were saying earlier on about that pilot, there needs to be outreach addiction services that reach out into the community and are culturally appropriate. That is the way to engage and to build that relationship. Otherwise, that gap is not going to be narrowed between the services that are there and many of the Travellers. An individual Traveller may come in and go out. Even within that, a lot of younger Travellers find it hard to be in that environment sometimes because of racism and discrimination within some of the groups. Even though they are disadvantaged groups, they still have that exclusion, and likewise in the LGBT community. We need to look at how we address some of the internal stuff within the services because that is what has come back. There are ways of addressing some of those things. It is not beyond the capacity of the members of the communities who are working on the ground to address some of those issues but they need the collaboration and the resources to do that and the structures to do that in. There is a very high percentage of younger Travellers in Oberstown and we need to look at that.

I mentioned Dóchas earlier in terms of prisoners coming out of prison and the supports they get, for example, Traveller women coming out of Dóchas. We need to put in supports for the women coming out. When moving on to private rented accommodation, they might be excluded from their community. They are left in a position where there is a very high chance, and it has happened many times, that they will end up back in there again. A lot them do not get the support they need. Those issues need to be addressed. I am also talking about younger women.