Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I join colleagues in complimenting former Senator, Colette Kelleher, on her work in this area, along with Oein DeBhairduin, Senator Flynn and, in particular, Deputy Pringle, who has brought forward this Bill. As has been noted, it is a short Bill to promote understanding of the culture and history of the Traveller community. The question that strikes me is why we have to do pass legislation to do that. I want to use my time to look at why we do.

Realistically, if we are to address the discrimination Travellers face on a daily basis, we must acknowledge the State's role in the policy that got us here. Travellers' history, including their impact and role in the War of Independence, the role their clans played throughout our history and the history of their music and culture, is hidden from us. It is hidden from Traveller children and the wealth and richness of it are also, crucially, hidden from non-Traveller children. That creates a reliance on negative stereotypes and a cycle of racism and discrimination. The State as a whole, from its foundation, made a decision that Travellers were of no real value and set in process a policy of assimilating and absorbing them. This was backed up by legislation in 1925, three years after the State was founded, and continued right up until 2002, with the introduction of the trespass legislation.

I see the history of this State as one that includes a process of legislative cleansing of the Traveller community. The Local Government Act 1925 had a clear intent to remove Travellers from the physical environment. It was not stated quite so, but when the Act was reviewed in 1947, the then Minister said it was specifically targeted at those living at the side of the road. The State initiated an attack on a people's identity, seeking the erosion of that identity and culture. This meant they were seen as not being entitled to the same recognition, investment, resources and rights as settled people. There was a significant demarcation between them and us. The greatest insult of all was in the past ten years, when the austerity that was imposed on the people of this country saw an 85.5% cut in provision for Traveller education. That is a shocking statistic.

The Irish Free State's idea of what it was to be "true Irish" or "valued Irish" led it to create a monocultural identity. It did this in partnership with the Catholic Church, as we have seen through the pages of history. We are now more aware of what happened to women, with the backlash and counter-revolution against them by way of the Magdalen laundries, mother and baby homes, etc. We are more aware of that now, as well as the incarceration of the poor in industrial schools. That incarceration did not exclude children and poor from the Traveller community. The same level of investigation into the history of the treatment of the Traveller community by this State has not been done. It needs to be done. We must face up to what is deeply inherent in the State by way of a legislative process that encompasses all the arms of the State, including medicine, the courts, the Garda, local authorities and so on. There is a deeply embedded bias against Travellers and it is in the Department of Education as well.

That early intent of the Irish Free State to remove Travellers from the physical environment has been repeated several times. That was illustrated in the 1960s by the Commission on Itinerancy to which reference was made. It was headed up by Charles J. Haughey, the then Minister for Justice, who stated at the time there could be no final solution until itinerant families were absorbed into the general community. That is what has been happening. As noted by Deputy Connolly, there were no representatives of the Traveller community or organisations that cared about Travellers on that commission. We should look back at the history of this State and how it set out to hide the Travelling community, to impoverish it and to embed racism into every system.

That has been the experience of many Deputies, particularly at local authority level, in the context of the local Traveller accommodation committees, which have been an absolute farce because Traveller accommodation and education have only worsened since. I very much recommend the Bill but, ultimately, this issue will not be truly dealt with until we fess up and have a full investigation into the actions of the Irish Free State. As we will be commemorating 100 years since its establishment shortly, this is the time to look back in history and see how the legislative cleansing of the Travelling community was repeated several times through the decades. Let us begin by passing this legislation post-haste and ending that sort of legislative cleansing.

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