Technical Report - Donegal Traveller's Project

Health Survey FindingsMapping and Scoping ExerciseThe main purpose of the mapping process was to identify all Irish Traveller families on the island, sothey could be offered the opportunity to participate in the study.Objectives of the Mapping Exercise• To identify the number and location of Travellers/Traveller families by project and region.• To develop and maintain a comprehensive database of Traveller and HSE study coordinators.• To identify Traveller Peer Researchers for training.• To assess level of coverage of Traveller families in the country by study coordinators and PeerResearchers and to identify gaps at local and regional level.• To estimate the number of computers required for each project/region based on the numberof Traveller families/number of Peer Researchers/number of coordinators and size of area to becovered. Laptop computers were used for data collection.• To determine the capacity and challenges locally and regionally to facilitate the implementation ofthe study.Rationale for the Mapping and Enumeration ProcessThe number of Travellers in the National census (Central Statistics Office, 2003a) is accepted tobe under-reported (Kobayashi, 2005), so the study team required another process to identify andenumerate all the Traveller families in Ireland.The first stage in determining the study population of Irish Travellers was to build on the processalready commenced by Pavee Point via the National Traveller Health Network and the TravellerCDP network. This process had commenced in 2005-2006, when the understanding was that theDepartment of Health and Children were going to use the CSO 2006 census data as their populationdenominator. The Traveller groups did not feel confident with this, as they felt the 2006 census did notaccurately reflect the true number of Travellers in Ireland, so they commenced a process of asking allTraveller Link Projects to count the local Travellers.The projects in these Networks were asked to identify the number of Traveller families within theirworking areas. This information was collated and updated for the study, with Pavee Point workingjointly with the UCD study team. As part of the verification procedure for this information, the feedbackfrom this process was cross-referenced with the annual count of Traveller families, which is done by theDepartment of the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government each year.As a result of this process by the Traveller Networks, the mapping figure for the study in September2008 was a Traveller family population of approximately 9,548. This population count allowed anestimation of the numbers of Peer Researchers and computers required at project level and anestimation of the duration of the census.49