State apology to Travellers must be made for decades of ‘profound harm’, conference to hear

A State apology to Travellers, similar to those made to indigenous people in Australia and Canada, must be made for the “profound harm and neglect” inflicted over many decades, a conference will hear on Thursday.

The first “national assembly on a State apology to Travellers”, convened by the Irish Traveller Movement (ITM), will hear calls for State acknowledgment of such abuses as segregated schools, forced removal of Traveller children from their families and policies aimed at assimilating Travellers into settled society.

The event, to be attended by Travellers from across the State, is intended to kick-start a campaign on the issue. Delivering the keynote address will be Sissy Austin, an Aboriginal Australian activist and child protection advocate.

While Traveller ethnicity was recognised in 2017, it “fell short of a State apology”, said Bernard Joyce, ITM director.

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Ms Austin will speak via video link from Australia and say: “Truth telling and acknowledging past injustices is key to the healing of a country.

“A country that sweeps injustices against its own people under the carpet is an unhealthy country, not only unhealthy for those directly impacted, but unhealthy for those who make choices to live with no integrity.

“Saying sorry is a step in a healing journey. Here in Australia, prime minister Kevin Rudd responded to the long overdue calls for a national apology to the stolen generation. My father is a member of the stolen generation and always says that the apology was a step in his healing journey.”

A series of laws, enacted in Australia between 1910 and the 1970s, saw thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children forcibly removed from their families and way of life. These became known as the “stolen generation”. In 2008, Mr Rudd, then prime minister, delivered a formal apology.

Though no such policy was formally initiated here, it was considered in the 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy, which discussed how best to achieve Travellers’ “absorption into the general community”, even giving serious consideration to the “solution” of “itinerant children being taken from their families and placed in institutions”.

In one generation, it said, “itinerants as a class would disappear”. In the end, however, it cautioned against this, saying any advantages would be negligible, given the “lasting legacy of bitterness” it could give rise to.

A discussion paper, seen by The Irish Times, says: “Irish Governments’ approach following the 1963 report worked off principles of assimilation, absorption and rehabilitation, and created the conditions for how Travellers were treated socially, culturally, economically and politically and across all the institutions of the State still evident today.”

Many will point to the over-representation of Traveller children in care and detention centres, to the use of “reduced timetables” with Traveller children and the ongoing failure of the State to provide adequate culturally appropriate accommodation to the community to rent.

The paper suggests: “For an apology to be meaningful, it should be confirmed through undertaking further actions”, which could include redress.

Among other speakers will be Catherine Joyce, manager of the Blanchardstown Traveller Development Group, Oein DeBhairduin, who is Traveller cultural collections officer at the National Museum, and Trish Reilly, activist and singer songwriter.