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In Ireland you've got traveller gypsies (distinct from the Roma), who despite making up only 0.6% of the population account for 10% of the male and 22% of the female prisoner population. And this is with them being underpoliced given that it's fairly hard to catch them since they've got tightly knit communities across Ireland and the UK to disappear into and if they come to your house telling you not to talk to the police you're best off taking that advice.
That linked article also mentions New Zealand, "where Maori people accounted for about 14 per cent of the population" and "represented 50.8 per cent of prisoners".
And, correct me if I’m wrong, but Irish travelers are visually indistinguishable from your average Seamus, aren’t they? That would provide at least some evidence against discrimination as the main or proximal cause.
Irish people can tell pretty reliably by dress, accent, demeanour etc, and if you've lived somewhere for a while you'll get to know what the local families look like. Though illegal there's fairly universal discrimination against them in pubs, hotels, restaurants and the like. You can make decent money allowing a good traveller family to become regulars at your pub, that is until their cousins arrive..
Police and bouncers might give you some hassle for sharing a surname with a local traveller family, but there's so much overlap with normal Irish surnames (e.g Joyce, Barret, McDonagh) that it's only a useful clue in the context of other things. A friend of mine once got arrested after being jumped for answering yes when asked "are you one of the McDonaghs?" (ironically there's a good chance one of the McDonaghs was involved in jumping him).
But to answer your question, if a traveller drops the accent and exits the culture they can become indistinguishable from any other Irish person. I've got a programmer friend like that who lives abroad now.
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Totally fair. If one were to lecture New Zealand based on their aggregate statistics that they ought to follow (say) Norway's criminal justice practices to obtain Norway's more favorable outcomes, it seems like a pretty obvious response that one ought to control (at the very least!) for the presence of Maori people before attempting to draw policy conclusions from differences in raw population outcomes.
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