Pavee Point Traveller & Roma Centre Sheehy Skeffington School April 2015.

Pavee Point Traveller & Roma CentrePavee Point Traveller & Roma Centre

Sheehy Skeffington SchoolApril 2015

Who is Pavee Point?Who is Pavee Point?• National NGO• Partnership Organisation• Recognise Travellers as a minority ethnic

group• Racism• Traveller Self-Determination• Community Development Approach

Travellers….Travellers….• Centenary of 1916• The Proclamation • Ideals and values, not realised• New vision, new approach• Society • Pluralism• Egalitarian and inclusive

• Travellers excluded politically, economically, culturally and socially

• Manifested in Travellers lower health status, high unemployment rates, low educational attainment, lack of political participation, discrimination in accessing goods and services and denial of racism and Traveller ethnicity

Are Travellers an Ethnic Minority?Are Travellers an Ethnic Minority?

• Ireland unilaterally does not recognise Travellers as Minority Ethnic Group. (MEG)

• In 2012, at the UPR hearing in Geneva, Ireland said that it is looking into the matter seriously.

• The UN Committee on Human Rights urged Ireland in 2007 to reconsider the position of Travellers as a MEG

• CERD 2005 and 2011.

Travellers as an Ethnic MinorityTravellers as an Ethnic Minority

• Oireachtas inquiry into racism• Office for the Promotion of Migrant

Integration Strategy • Travellers excluded from these

Travellers and DiscriminationTravellers and Discrimination

“Traveller culture “is a life of appetite ungoverned by intellect…It is a life worse than the life of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals. This tinker ‘culture’ is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of the surprising things about it is that not every individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil.”

Mary Ellen Synon, Sunday Independent, 1996

• National Traveller Roma Integration Strategy

• National Traveller Roma Steering Group• Traveller Roma Inclusion Unit

Looking ForwardLooking Forward

Pavee Point Travellers’ Centre

Thank YouThank You

www.paveepoint.iewww.paveepoint.ie