Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Today was very educational for us and that is important. The challenges are enormous. One thing I have found in politics - and I am at it a long time - is that as soon as you solve one problem, another problem appears on the horizon. That goes right across life.

However, that does not justify not trying to solve problems continuously. We need to consider what overall progress we have made. There certainly has been progress but I have also seen regression. One of the things I greatly regret is that, as has been explained so often today, Travellers were very busy people who had trades and employment and we, the settled community, closed the door to a lot of that. No effort was made to replace and use the talent. That was an enormous mistake.

The priest who built Knock Airport against the odds was Monsignor James Horan. He used to talk about the MAD fight, which beats all of us all the time. He did not mean "mad" but rather it was an acronym meaning maximum administrative delay, MAD. You can come up against that when you are trying to change things and all of us have. There is an inertia in the system at which you must constantly push. However, when I look at Knock Airport today, I think that Monsignor Horan overcame the MAD fight because he built it. We have to continue to fight inertia. Sometimes there is goodwill to change but no action. We have to convert that goodwill into action.

Another thing I have found in life is that it is easy to prejudge who is going to help and who is not. It is easy to assume you will not get any help from this person, people from that party or whoever else. The Irish phrase, "Is fánach an áit a bhfaighfeá gliomac", translates literally as, "You find lobsters in strange places." The meaning of the phrase is that you often find that the person you least expect to help turns out to be the most supportive. If I might say so, sometimes you find those who you thought would be of a lot of help are not so supportive. It is absolutely vital to reach out to everybody, without exception. As I said, I think our guests might be surprised at times by both sides of that particular coin and will be surprised by the doors that will open and the people who will support a just set of issues that we need to tackle.

The point was made earlier that people would have hoped our guests would not be gathered here. I would qualify that and say that people would have hoped they would not be gathered here with a shopping list of problems. I would hope that the Traveller community would retain its identity as Irish Travellers and that our guests would be here celebrating their identity. I would hope that the list of challenges with which they would be trying to deal would be far shorter and the list of things they would be celebrating would be longer.

Senator Flynn has done an outstanding job as the Cathaoirleach of the committee and the staff have been absolutely fantastic in organising this day and bringing our guests to the centre of Irish politics and looking at this side of the House. I hope many Travellers will sit as Senators or TDs in the future. I spent three and a half years in the Seanad and have spent 30 years in the Dáil and until today, I never chaired a committee meeting.