 Thirty years ago, on a snowy January morning, a number of us assembled in Dublin to begin a small community work human rights programme with travellers, the most marginalised group in our society at that point in time. Thirty years later, there are still grave inequalities and there are still a number of rights gaps for travellers and for Roma in Ireland. But there's a strong traveller and Roma movement in Ireland which is struggling to ensure that those rights are realised and which in a number of areas have achieved that. For example, one of those rights which indeed was recommended to be implemented by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which I have the honour to chair, was the rights of travellers to self-identify, the right to have their ethnicity acknowledged, the right to be acknowledged as a minority ethnic group in our society. We now have very clear indications that the Government of Ireland is moving positively to vindicate that right. A lot has happened to end discrimination and to end racism, but a lot remains and I am very, very concerned at a number of the challenges that have now been posed in today's world and at the ways in which complex current forms of racial discrimination are afflicting people in all parts of the world.