Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I also welcome the opportunity to discuss the contents of this important report. First, like others, I pay tribute to everyone responsible for bringing it together and in particular, the Chair, Senator Flynn and all the Traveller-led organisations, not least the Tallaght Traveller Community Development Project which contributed on education.

Senator Flynn made the point in her foreword that there have been numerous reports and studies produced over the years that have highlighted the extreme difficulties faced by the Traveller community. The trouble is when it comes to implementing those reports. The report has strong and clear recommendations and I will touch on just a few of them.

The issue that Senator Flynn rightly highlighted as being so disturbing is that of suicide and mental health in the Traveller community. The statistics are shocking in that 90% of Travellers agreed that mental health problems were common in their community, while suicide is the cause of 11% of Traveller deaths. I was glad to see the committee did not mince its words when talking about the causes of the crisis when it stated “Travellers’ daily experiences of racism and exclusion have a profound effect on their mental health.” We know how important a person’s home is for giving them a root and foundation. Security of accommodation and adequate accommodation are fundamental. Deficient and substandard living conditions, as well as precarious accommodation and homelessness, have an impact on mental health and on wider health issues within the Traveller community. Lower educational outcomes also have a damaging impact on employment opportunities. Chronic unemployment also has a negative consequences on mental health. All these things are interconnected.

While we are discussing the critical importance of the implementation of reports, it must be acknowledged that the implementation of the Traveller-Specific Accommodation report has been painfully slow. We are not leading by example in implementing the recommendations on that. The report also addresses the fact that families are sharing bays on halting sites or living in the yards of the houses of family members in group housing schemes. In those cases, families share one another’s electricity supply.

I wish to raise one particular issue that came to my attention during the briefing I hosted last week about energy poverty. Aoife, a representative from the National Traveller Money Advice and Budgeting Service pointed out that the families who shared bays had to share the €200 credit as the doubling up was not taken into account. There were other examples where the credit was shared between multiple families. There were other cases where the local authority did not pass on that €200 rebate. I hope that the Minister will take back to his Government colleagues that if we are going to roll out another €200 rebate, we must make sure that families who should have got the first rebate do receive it and that we get answers as to why local authorities have not passed it on. If this is to be repeated in the early budget to be announced in September, the flaw in the legislation that enabled this must be fixed.

There is so much in this report I would like to discuss. There is a lot in it to make you angry, sad, and frustrated. We all have to accept that the structural biases against Travellers are real and have a devastating effect on their lives. However, there is also a lot of cause for hope in the report. I commend the activity of Travellers organising and agitating for something better for themselves and their families. I thank the committee for its report.