Irish Traveller-led evidence
in Leinster House.

Joint Committee session · 7 May 2026

On 7 May 2026, the Joint Committee on Key Issues Affecting the Traveller Community held a public session in Leinster House on Irish Traveller identity, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and related matters with TraVision Foundation.

The witnesses named in TraVision’s retained account were Bernard Sweeney, Founder and Director of TraVision Foundation; Dylan Foley, archaeologist; and Professor Fergus Shanahan, microbiologist. The session brought Irish Traveller-led testimony, history, archaeology and microbiome science into the same parliamentary discussion.

Watch the committee recording

The HEAnet-hosted recording below is the public audiovisual record used by this Library for the 7 May 2026 session. The player does not autoplay. If third-party framing is unavailable in a browser, the player provides a direct HEAnet fallback link.

What the session covered

TraVision’s contribution asked the Committee to consider Irish Traveller identity through more than one discipline. The retained Foundation account identifies the following themes from the discussion:

• Irish Traveller origins and the limits of the Famine drop-out account.
• The distinction between Irish Travellers and European Roma.
• Colonial law, settlement and the creation of a fixed settled norm.
• The 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy and its absorption policy.
• Microbiome research concerning environment, lifeways and forced social change.
• Identity, racism, mental health and suicide as connected research questions rather than a single-cause explanation.
• The case for multidisciplinary and Irish Traveller-led research.

This page is deliberately separate from Bernard Sweeney’s full paper Ongoing Colonisation, Settlement and Suicide among Irish Travellers. The committee recording is a public-record resource; the paper is a distinct authored publication with its own evidence base, argument, caveats and bibliography.

Read the full Ongoing Colonisation publication