Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Flynn for the leadership she is showing in driving the committee to deliver this report with its 84 recommendations. Tuesday was the anniversary of the day we recognised Traveller ethnicity. This has been a long struggle by the Travelling community to have their unique ethnic status recognised by the State. We did so about five years ago. While it was an important symbolic decision to make, very little has changed as a result of that. We now need more than just symbolism and words. To quote Senator Flynn, we need to put our name on it as Deputies and Ministers.

The recommendations in the report cut across many Departments. I will be writing to the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth to include oversight of these recommendations. How are we going to do this? How are we going to put our name to it? How are we going to keep an eye on it to ensure this work is being done? This cuts across many committees. I am sure other Deputies will be doing the same thing. This affects the committees on housing, children, justice and education. We need to make time in our workflow as the months go on to ensure we are putting our name to it. The last thing we need to do is to allow the report to gather dust.

I looked through some of the report's recommendations, thinking back through the work we did. As Deputy Bríd Smith said, we went to Labre Park which is in my and her constituency. Among those in Labre Park, the sense of betrayal and of being let down by Dublin City Council and the powers that be was palpable. Some good community work was being done and there were some great people with very clear and articulate voices in the community. However, their simple demands for a space that was not infested with rats were not being met by Dublin City Council.

Senator Flynn referred to a €72 million budget for housing that had not been spent. If local authorities are not spending the budget, we need to take the responsibility away from them and ensure we are delivering. If local authorities and councillors are not delivering on Traveller accommodation, we need to find ways to do that. One of the recommendations is a national Traveller accommodation authority to take that power to push these things through and to ensure that whoever is in charge of the Traveller accommodation committee - whoever has replaced Deputy Bríd Smith on Dublin City Council - is not running into the same roadblocks and banging their head off the same wall. It is all well and good for us to talk about it, but behind that as we all know, large numbers of Travellers are struggling without decent accommodation.

Other Deputies have spoken about the knock-on consequences on health and mental health. We need to find where those blocks are and get them out of the way. If the blocks are our local authorities, then we need to get them out of the way and we need to take powers from them if that is what it takes. It is only by recognising inequality that we can begin to address at. Establishing a joint committee was definitely a good first step, but it is now up to the rest of us to keep pushing, to keep asking and to put our names to it.

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