A NEW report on extremism and racism in Europe has, concluded that the "travelling community are today the people who most obviously suffer the effects of racism in Ireland."
The report, Extremism from the Atlantic to the Urals, was compiled by the European Centre for Research and Action on Racism and Anti Semitism (CERA) in Paris for the European Parliament. CERA was set up in 1992 by the European Jewish Congress. The former European Commission president, Mr Jacques Delors, and the current president of the European Parliament, Mr Klaus Hansch, sit on its sponsoring committee.
The report finds that travellers are a uniquely disadvantaged group of people living on the margins of Irish society, who are impoverished, undereducated and very often despised and ostracised".
The fact that over a thousand of the community's approximately 4,000 families "live on the side of the road in appalling conditions, with poor shelter and lack of basic facilities such as electricity, running water, toilets and refuse collections, in a modern European country, is quite startling," the report says.
"In every area of social life," it argues, "travellers experience exclusion and discrimination, e.g. in shops, restaurants, launderettes, pubs and hotels."
The section on Ireland, compiled by Ms Elizabeth King, a researcher at Queen's University Belfast, goes on: "While there are no specifically anti travellers groups, there have been increasing incidents where communities, I have come together, in what has, been referred to as vigilante type groups, to prevent halting sites being built or travellers being housed in their area."
The report cites the blocking of roads against travellers' cars and caravans in Meath in Augusta 1995, the spreading of foul smelling fertiliser beside a caravan site in Waterford in October 1995 and the burning of the caravan of a family with 12 children in Bray in, November 1994.
Elsewhere, the report says Ireland's 33 000 immigrants are subject to occasional incidents of racial abuse and xenophobia, but these "are isolated, and, unlike bother European countries, have not created a major crisis. Nevertheless," the report continues, "there is need for concern as both individuals and institutions have been guilty of racism.
"The lack of legislation to protect the foreigner/refugee/asylum seeker," it continues, is due to the fact that Ireland is still awaiting the introduction of a Refugee Bill."
The report also quotes a 1995 National Youth Council study on racism and intolerance in Ireland. This cited examples of Jewish shops being attacked in Dublin, and of a Moroccan man and his Irish wife and child being physically and verbally abused. However, the report says that "anti attacks have been minimal" on (the island of) Ireland's 1,800 strong Jewish community.