This State had "a long way to go to create the kind of society where Travellers can reach their full potential", Minister for Health Mary Harney said yesterday.
"Although some Travellers were involved in criminality - similar to a section of the settled community - the vast majority were law-abiding citizens," she continued. Travellers still "confront enormous discrimination" at many levels of Irish society, she said.
The Minister was speaking at the National Gallery in Dublin at an event held to mark the start of Traveller Focus Week. The theme of the week is participation - focusing on Travellers' contribution to Irish art, music, culture and society.
Present for the event was painter Louis le Broquy, recently 90, and whose "Tinker" series of paintings is being published as a calendar by the National Action Plan Against Racism to mark this week. He was accompanied by his son, Pierre, and wife, Anne Madden.
He said Travellers represented the human condition. They "had their own traditions, their own pride, their own ways and their own strict morality. They have been prejudicially excluded by our settled society, yet they belong to us - they are a variant within us."
Before he spoke he called for a minute's silence for a recently deceased Traveller woman whose funeral was taking place as the event got under way.
The director of Pavee Point Travellers' Centre in Dublin, Ronnie Fay, said Traveller participation in Irish society had long been overlooked. "The focus on Travellers is all too often a negative one," she said.