The Government should grant recognition to Travellers as a distinct ethnic group, according to the Equality Authority. This would bring with it a number of protections under international conventions.
The recommendation comes in a report published yesterday by the authority. The report was commissioned in response to a statement from the Government in 2004 to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that it did not regard Travellers as a distinct ethnic group.
The UN committee said in reply that such recognition had important implications under the UN convention on the elimination of racial discrimination, and it urged the Government to "work more concretely towards recognising the Traveller community as an ethnic group".
The Government responded that the case "had not been proven".
The Equality Authority report is a review of all the academic literature and political debate on the issue. It concludes that there is an academic consensus on the matter, contrary to the Government's claim that Traveller ethnicity is "controversial within academic research".
The report outlines the evolution of Government policy on Travellers. It points out that the incorporation of an ethnic definition of Travellers in the equality legislation was specifically understood by the Oireachtas as removing any doubts as to whether Travellers were entitled to the protections for ethnic groups provided for in the UN convention.
"The position taken recently by the Government in explicitly denying that Travellers should be recognised as an ethnic group in the context of the convention is therefore surprising," it states.
The report then examines academic work, primarily from anthropologists, on ethnicity and Travellers.
It points out that they meet the criteria established by this research. These include biological self-perpetuation, with group membership determined by descent; shared fundamental cultural values, including nomadism; obligations based on kinship, self-employment and distinctive beliefs around cleanliness and pollution; their own form of communication, with a distinctive language; and a name for themselves, just as non-Travellers have names for Travellers, and know to whom it applies.
The chief executive of the Equality Authority, Niall Crowley, said the definition of Travellers in the Equal Status Act marked a defining moment in the policy debate on this issue, and he said the then minister for justice, John O'Donoghue, had no difficulty with this definition, which followed the Northern Ireland Race Relations Directive.