THE GOVERNMENT’S refusal to grant Travellers the status of an ethnic group is impeding the progress of the Travelling community in achieving equality in society, members of the Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) were told at their annual general meeting yesterday.
Former Equality Authority chief executive and founding member of the Irish Traveller Movement, Niall Crowley, said the status would enable “new relations of respect and trust between Travellers and the settled community”.
The failure to recognise Traveller ethnicity has seen Travellers excluded from debates about integration and how society manages cultural diversity, he said.
Despite a United Nations recommendation urging Ireland to grant ethnic status to Travellers, the “Irish Government remain in defiance of that United Nations position”, Mr Crowley said.
Speaking at the meeting in Athlone, Mr Crowley said a recognition of Travellers as an ethnic group “could usefully be accompanied by new provisions in equality legislation requiring service providers to make reasonable accommodation to take account of the practical implications of Traveller ethnicity”.
ITM director Damien Peelo said: “In 2005 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that the Irish Government should work towards recognising Travellers as an ethnic group, expressing concern that a failure to do so may have serious implications for the application of its articles.”
He said that to recognise Travellers as an ethnic group “is not to state that Travellers are a distinct race from the rest of the Irish population” but that it would have implications for the recognition and respect for Travellers’ cultural identity “and the obligation to ensure that respect is reflected in policy decisions by Government and public bodies”.
Such recognition would ensure the rights and protections enjoyed by ethnic groups would be applied to Travellers, he said.