Dr. Sindy Joyce:

I thank the committee for inviting us here today to discuss the finding of the Irish Travellers' Access to Justice Research study. It was funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, and the Irish Research Council and was conducted through research from the European Centre for the Study of Hate at the University of Limerick. The research team was majority Traveller and four of the six-person team are present today; Margaret O'Brien and Olive O'Reilly are the two team members who are not present. The research team was advised by a committee that was also majority Traveller and included representatives of Pavee Point, the Irish Traveller Movement, the National Traveller Women’s Forum, the Traveller Mediation Service, Minceirs Whiden, the Department of Justice and An Garda Síochána. The research team's findings are ground-breaking in providing for the first time a comprehensive, human rights informed portrait of Travellers' perceptions and experiences of the criminal justice system.

The team conducted lengthy survey interviews with one in every 60 adult Travellers in Ireland and conducted 29 interviews with people working with Traveller organisations nationally and regionally. We found that Travellers see themselves as suspect in the eyes of the police and the courts, simply because of their ethnicity. They experience over-policing as a community and under-policing as victims of crime. We provide robust evidence of a pipeline to prison, fuelled by racial profiling, a disproportionate use of stop and search powers, including shockingly common searches of Traveller homes, and concomitantly high rates of arrest. Some Travellers described police provocation, in particular of young men. In court, Travellers report indifference to the barriers the community encounters around accessing justice.

They perceive that Travellers are guilty until proven innocent. There is a disproportionately high number of Travellers in prison for minor offending. In recounting their most negative experience with judges in the past five years, a key theme which arose in our research was the belief that Travellers receive disproportionately high sentences compared to their settled counterparts. It is important to say that we found evidence of good practices also among members of the police and the Judiciary but these were the exception rather than the rule and dependent on committed individuals, not on institutionally embedded practice.

We welcome this opportunity to discuss both the findings of the report and the State’s responses to those findings in the two and a half years since its publication. In recruiting participants to the research, we made a commitment that this research would not sit on the shelf, but that we would advocate for action on the findings and recommendations. Since the launch of the report, we have presented to two United Nations committees, the Council of Europe, the Policing Authority and Garda Ombudsman, representatives of An Garda Síochána, the EU Subgroup on Equality Data, the District Court judges conference, the steering committee of NTRIS and the Department of Justice. It is disappointing, therefore, that the State has yet to adopt or act on the recommendations of the report in any meaningful way. The report offers a comprehensive range of recommendations. Today, we would like to highlight three recommendations of the research.