Traveller hopes for TCD Seanad seat

It is "little wonder" suicide rates are so high among the Traveller community, says Rosaleen McDonagh (39), who is hoping to become the first Traveller elected to the Oireachtas.

Standing for the Seanad, she says Travellers in Ireland "absorb from the day they are born that they are the dirt on the settled community's shoe". Achieving pride in their identity will be essential if Travellers are to achieve true equality, she says.

Winning one of the three Trinity College seats would be "hugely symbolic" - not only for Travellers but also for anyone with a disability or anyone else who has had to "overachieve in order to have any credibility in this country".

Handing in her nomination papers for the election last month was one of the most daunting things she has done. "I had forgotten the 'old boys' network' could be so visible," she smiles. "I was the only woman there." Though the other woman candidate, Ivana Bacik, did arrive a little after she arrived, she says she felt "it was just the wrong place to be a Traveller, to be a woman, to be disabled".

Asked why she is standing, the Trinity graduate of English literature says he stood in 2002 as she was conscious of how privileged she was in comparison with most Travellers; she felt she should use her education and that "it would be a bit of gas". And then, from a possible electorate of about 48,000, she got 733 first preferences - far more than she had expected - and concluded: "There's something in this." She knows she has, again, a tough battle against such other candidates for the three seats as David Norris, Shane Ross and Ms Bacik.

"The other candidates have a network of people who will vote for them." Though she feels herself "incredibly privileged", she is conscious she does not come from "generations of privilege" as most of the other candidates have. One of 20 children from a Sligo family, she was taken from her family into care - because she has cerebral palsy - against her parents' wishes. It is an issue which clearly upsets her. "I will be bearing the scars from that for the rest of my life," she says.

"They [the authorities] wanted to break the bond between me and the family, but they didn't. I was in care in Dublin and my family moved to Dublin to be near me. They were very proud of me. The times I went home they never hid me away."

She left school at 13 and didn't consider secondary school until she was 18. Through contacts in the Parish of the Travelling People she got grinds at the Leeson Street Institute for Education and then studied English at Trinity.

She did a masters in Trinity in racial and ethnic studies and now co-ordinates the programme on violence against women for the Traveller support organisation, Pavee Point.

If elected she would campaign for reform of the Seanad, which she believes is "very inactive", and for both Traveller and disability issues - areas which she believes are paid lip service.