Travellers to protest at Dáil amid mental health crisis

Senator Eileen Flynn said the network has been calling for action on the issue for many years. She pointed to statistics showing that 44% of Travellers have been affected by deaths by suicide in their immediate or extended family.

“The Traveller community can’t wait any longer,” she said.

“The Minister for Health and the Minister for Mental Health need to come together and deliver what was promised, and the time to do that is now. The minister has the power to do the right thing,” Ms Flynn said.

She said the only way to tackle this crisis seriously is by listening to the Traveller community, and she urged “implementing what was promised in October 2020” for this.

“That programme for the government was published in October 2020, and we’re still waiting,” she said.

“We need a standalone national Traveller mental health strategy.”

The Programme for Government committed to publishing a Traveller and Roma mental health action plan.

While a National Traveller Health Action Plan 2022-2027 has been published, Ms Flynn called for more targeted action on mental health.

She said the most recent study by Behaviour and Attitudes also showed 90% of those surveyed agreed that mental health was a problem among the Traveller community.

Mags Casey, chairwoman of the National Traveller Mental Health Network, supported her calls for change. She said: 

The conditions that Travellers are forced to live in and endure is due to a denial of human rights and lack of political will on successive Irish governments. 

Over the last 50 years, she said Travellers have taken part in national committees, policy arenas, advisory groups and task forces.

These have, she said, “made numerous recommendations without any real outcomes or change for Travellers in Ireland, and yet no one is held accountable for this.”

She called for the Government to answer for the lack of progress, saying: “we now call on the Taoiseach to take immediate action to address this situation for our people.”

Ms Casey said the network is urging Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to meet with them.

She said he needs to explain “why this situation has been allowed to continue unaddressed with no one answerable or held to account”.

They highlighted “the dire conditions” in which Travellers live, and also queried the failures of successive governments to address this.

“While the many research reports, recommendations, promises and commitments continue to go unimplemented ... the Traveller community — an indigenous ethnic minority group — are condemned to live in deplorable conditions with no hope of a future due to institutionalised racism and a lack of political will,” the Network said.

The National Traveller Mental Health Network will protest outside the Dáil on Tuesday from 12pm to 2pm.