Joe O'Reilly: Traveller Microbiomes, Depression and Policy

Thank you Chair, and I suppose my initial course to welcome you here and thank you for your presentations, and it's all fascinating, even at an academic level it's fascinating, but of course our job is to try to apply it to real life, but it's a fascinating discussion and really I'd like to read more of it and understand it better on a purely intellectual academic level, but then our function here is to see how can we bring that to affect lives for the better. But again, like my colleague the last Comhairleach of the Seanad, Senator Byrne, I'm going to focus initially on Professor Seanad's work forcing populations with older non-industrial life ways into settled environments, alters biology and affects the specific special microbiome that you discover, it affects immunity, et cetera, and what was very scary from my point of view because you could sort of, there was other compensatory elements in the settled life maybe for some of that, but the one that led the depression, I think that's a very serious thing, that maybe good housing could alter some of the other issues, the depression is a very disturbing one. Just in practical terms for legislators, for policy implementers, for civil servants or whatever, while this is all fascinating, there's not much we can do about it, Esther. If you could answer two things, the question there's not much we can do about it in reality, if we're to do what Pabbie Point would ask if they were in next week, there's not much we can do. And on the other hand, would you focus in on the depression bit because that's very concerning, you know what I mean, if I'm making myself a little bit clearer. Yeah, I will, I'm not saying it's easy, nothing is easy, we wouldn't be here if any of this is easy. If you're not saying it's easy, how would you do it if you were given the policy role in the morning? Well, I mentioned one thing, I wouldn't just consult with traveller groups, and it wouldn't just be Pabbie Point incidentally, just in the same way that settled communities are represented by many different political parties at different times, the travellers are entitled to multiple organisations and that's not to make it more difficult, that's just a fact of life, why shouldn't they have? But I would certainly have travellers, not just consulted, but have them very much involved in the policy changes, if there's going to be changes. I think that one thing that, you know, we can't just shrug our shoulders and say, ah, what can we do about it? I'm reminded of what John Hume said in his Nobel Laureate, when he got the Nobel Prize, made the point that difference and diversity is the essence of humanity, and we should be not trying to assimilate the travellers and deal with the traveller quote problem, we should actually be celebrating the fact that we actually have what a fascinating ethnic group we have that lots of other countries don't have. You know, I mentioned about migrants, it wouldn't be unusual to find a non-industrialised microbiome in a migrant, and we know from migrants that their health deteriorates when they actually come into an opposing culture. So here we have a chance with 1% of our population, and maybe more than that, to actually try and make a difference. So all I would do is keep beating the same drum, let's not repeat the mistakes of the past, let's not keep talking about it as more of assimilation, let's find ways in which the travellers can actually live in Ireland, juxtaposed with the saddle community, but at least in culturally sensitive ways. I'm not asking for the sun, moon and stars, but I do think there must be ways to actually allow them to have access to their horses. If you call it horse projects, or whatever you want to do, there have to be ways to approach that. There are other things that can be done. If they've got a microbiome that's quite distinct from the saddle community, what's normal? What do we call normal anymore? So what are the dietary recommendations for travellers? If you've got a microbiome, for example, I'll give you an example from the migrant community. If you have a microbiome that's well suited to a situation in, say, Africa, where you're only sporadically accessible, you can access food, you're in a famine-torn country, you tend to have a microbiome that actually extracts the maximum amount of energy and calories out of the food you're able to get. If you transport that person with their microbiome into Ireland, in an obesogenic environment, they'll actually get all the diseases we've had, and even worse, much faster, because they have a microbiome that's not suited to that diet at all. Yet we've won public health organisation that actually, there's only one diet, and this is the diet that should be for everyone. There should be various diets for different people. That's another example. There are diseases that the travellers are actually resistant to. Now, we've enough bad stories about susceptibility to diseases. Here's one where we've actually got, and I'm talking about diseases that are, they won't kill you, but they're a scourge. Who hasn't got someone at home that hasn't got bad allergy, or bad allergies, or some sort of arthritis, or some immune-mediated disorders that the travellers are actually resistant to? Why aren't we looking at that? So there are things that actually people can start thinking differently about. On the depression issue, I personally think, but while I could spin you a microbiome story, and I've got colleagues who passionately believe, and there's a huge literature on a microbiome influencing brain health. There's no doubt that animals who are kept germ-free, micro-free, have distorted behaviour and have depressive-like behaviour. I personally think if there was never such a thing as a microbiome, if you take away people's culture, inadvertently, not unwittingly, you actually remove their sense of identity, and you'll see the same thing in every culture, whether it be the Inuit in North America, the Native American Indians, or original First Nation status in other countries. You'll get the same kind of depression and suicide issues as well. Thank you for that very fascinating answer. Before I come back to your idea of a democratic assembly for travellers, just to run one or two factual things past you. You're saying the allegations there that local authorities are not spending money on travellers. We had the local authorities in last week, in the absence of a lot of our Dáil colleagues here. When the senators were left, I put those questions to the local authority people, it said you're not spending, blah blah. They are adamant that the money for travellers is ring-fenced and the Auditor General and that they are spending it on travellers. Now I know you might argue, as to how you spend it, that's a debate, but they are saying it is a false allegation. Could you provide evidence? Yeah absolutely, I believe I can. One, they've changed the system slightly. One, they've slightly changed the system. Before you would allocate a particular sum of money to local authorities to draw down, to spend on travel accommodation. I once asked Finnegan, this is an article in the paper, so it's in the public domain also, TD David Stanton, and I asked him where does the money go? Does it go back to the exchequer? Where does the unspent money go? And he initially put an article in the paper saying that the unspent money goes into settled projects. The money that wasn't drawn down for travel accommodation went back into settled projects. So I think the system has slightly changed. And do you dispute their contention of last week? You can look at the blacks yourself, you can look at it and see if I'm understanding it correctly. Do you dispute their contention that the money they would, if they were sitting with you today, they would say we're spending the money on droppers? You might question how we're spending it. I would say a lot of what I've said that in the past I would have witnessed in terms of they might spend it on evictions, they might have bulldozers, JCBs. A lot of cases went to court in the years, particularly Mayo, to their pro-field solicitors and the council were fighting all these legal standings on behalf of droppers. So where would that money come from? And the money that wasn't spent, where does it go to and who was it spent on? According to David Stanton it goes back into settled projects. It might be very helpful to the committee if you could supply the secretariat here with evidence if you have it. I take David's word if he says he said it and he put it in the paper. He's an honest guy so I would imagine he would say that. All right. Can I just say something? In relation to your that there's not much you could do, that I would suggest that there's quite a lot you could do and that it's one of the reasons that we frame it in terms of colonialism is precisely because, not because it's an irrelevant thing, but because it's the whole thing in the sense that originally a lot of the body of law that came through and what we regard as norms, like Professor Shanahan was saying, come from a time that we're all aware of in history where the whole point was to assimilate the entire Irish population into a certain way of living and a certain type of system. Now that's exactly what my third question was about. You say that we need decolonialisation and that it was colonialisation that led to a lot of the traveller difficulties because we're not discussing what it meant for settled people today, but that it had done a lot of the traveller difficulties, it got rid of nomadism. But it's a contradiction. Are you saying that land was removed from them by colonialism? Surely if there are nomad people they wouldn't have land per se. The term nomad is also a colonial label. Gaelic clans moved in particular to us in certain circles. Not all Gaelic clans wandered in to see around the place. As Mr Ellis pointed out earlier on, his story would have been that Cromwell put us off our land. Well it must have been on land to be put off land in the first place. And then in 1652 you've got the Settlement of Ireland Act and this is the commenciation of creating English settlements that we later called Settled Irish. And these are labels we didn't call settled people. We didn't call settled people settled people. So if there were nomadic before then they were moving to different parcels of land at different times of the year. This is something Dylan would have studied. It would be straightforward in the sense that you have to understand that what we now call nomadic would have been from the colonial point of view. If you imagine Dublin, if you imagine the Pale or London, whatever way you want to look at it, that they're looking out at a world beyond the Pale that they don't understand. That beyond the Pale they call nomadic whether it is or not. One of the reasons for that would be that they would have used Roman law which would have meant that if the land was inhabited only by nomads it was legal to confiscate the land under English law. And therefore everyone was a nomad even if they weren't, if you see what I mean. I had a last question, and just very briefly. Just your assembly, maybe I'll wait until you come in. Do you want to come in? Your proposition of the assembly, how would, I mean, would you just see that as a talking shop what would be talked about there and what decisions would be there? Really quick things on that. Because I think that is an interesting, I think that's a good policy. The key that leads into this, one is that we are the only foundation probably on the planet that has brought this narrative together. And the only way we could have done that was by using multiple different dis-employees. Geneticists, microbiology, archaeology, psychiatry, political science, all of that. And the question about, we keep saying there's a lot you can do. Ireland has signed up to the United Nations international law in 1968 that ratified that in 2000. So there are obligations on behalf of the state to create corrective measures to iron these issues out. They're not fixed, they're not special treatment, they're just to fix what is broken. For the assembly, we believe that there should be an assembly where travellers have democracy. Like this state has already shown that. Dublin has shown that. This committee has shown that. You've allowed us in the door. You've welcomed us here. You've allowed us to speak freely. That is very democratical. That's very good of you to do that. We would say that because we've been governed with one discipline for a very long time, sociology, that there isn't really a process of democracy. We don't select or elect our people to represent us. They're hand-picked primarily by settled people who come in here and speak to you. That's the direction that has been going for a long time. We would slightly like to change that and give it fair representation. Because we don't believe in dismantling systems or tearing down systems, we believe in building them up and making them better.