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******* Racism in Ireland ********
TRAVELLERS FIGHTING BACK
Irish Travellers are a very small minority group in
Ireland, constituting less than 1% of the population.
Their numbers currently stand at approx. 23,000 people
in the Republic and another 1,500 in the North. There
are also an estimated 15,000 Irish Travellers in
England, Scotland and Wales and 7,000 in the U.S.A.
The population structure of the Traveller community
resembles that of a third world country, with large
numbers of children and very few in the older age
group. Poor health status, compounded by racist
policies and practices, and exclusion from mainstream
society are the causes of this situation. 50% of the
population is under 15 years. Some health statistics
revealed by the Health Status Report of the Health
Research Board in 1987 are worth quoting;
-> Travellers have more than double the national rate
of stillbirths.
-> Infant mortality rates are three times higher than
the national rate.
-> Traveller women live, on average, 12 years less than
settled women.
-> Traveller men live, on average, 10 years less than
settled men.
-> Travellers' life expectancy is now at the level that
settled people reached in the 1940's.
These are the statistics of racism, clearly
demonstrating that Travellers' lives are effected in
the most basic ways by their exclusion and
marginalisation. Statistics relating to their
educational levels reveal the same pariah status. Less
than 14% currently make it into post-primary education
and the number who have made it into third level can
still be counted on one hand. The majority of the
adults, 80%, are illiterate.
Ethnicity & Cultural Identity
Travellers constitute a distinct ethnic group within
Irish society. They fulfil all the criteria
internationally accepted as defining ethnicity:
-> A long shared history of which the group is
conscious.
-> A cultural tradition of its own including family and
social customs.
-> Descent from common ancestors - you must be born
into the group.
-> A common language.
-> A common religion.
-> Being a minority, or an oppressed or dominated
group, within a larger community.
There has been strong resistance to acknowledging
Travellers' ethnicity even from people who admit that
they do not know what the term means. This attitude
stems from the endemic racism towards them which
rejects any idea that they could be anything other than
"failed settled people". There is a fear that if
Travellers' claim to separate ethnicity is conceded
that allegations of racism which are currently
dismissed out of hand in most circles, would have some
credence.
The racism practised against Travellers in Ireland is
so all pervasive that it is not recognised as such
except by a small minority of progressive people. Most
left-wing groups either ignore the issue or contribute
to the racism themselves by adopting reactionary
positions. Travellers are marginalised and excluded
from all of the institutions and structures of Irish
society. The racism they experience operates at both
the individual and the institutional level.
At an institutional level Travellers have to sign for
the dole and for welfare at separate times. In the
case of Dublin, Travellers claiming welfare from the
Health Board have to do so at a completely separate and
segregated clinic. Travellers have to use a separate,
segregated, social work service and they are often
segregated into separate classes in school. Socially,
they are excluded from almost every pub in the country.
They are routinely refused service in shops, cafes,
cinemas, laundrettes and every recreational and social
outlet.
Over the past 18 months, there has been a substantial
increase in physical and ideological attacks on them.
Incidents recorded include an elderly couple attacked
on the beach in Bantry, Co.Cork, by hired thugs with
hurley sticks who left the woman with a broken nose. A
family was burned out of their caravan in Bray, Co.
Wicklow. Travellers were subjected to an organised
physical attack in Glenamaddy, Co. Galway, for having
the cheek to drink in one of the few pubs that served
them. This pub has since lost its licence as a warning
to other publicans not to serve Travellers.
The list goes on and covers all parts of the country
and every situation where Travellers attempt to live
their lives. On an individual level, there is almost
total segregation between Travellers and the sedentary
population. Social contact is minimal because
Travellers have been excluded from such contact.
The effects of this racism are not hard to find. Most
Travellers lack self-esteem. Pride in their cultural
identity is a very new experience and confined to the
minority who have had some adult education and
training. Self-destructive and even anti-social
behaviour arises out of this total experience of
racism. Less than 14% of Travellers currently make it
into post-primary education and the majority of the
adults are illiterate. Organising politically in this
situation is difficult but not impossible as this
article will demonstrate.
Irish Travellers share strong cultural ties with other
nomadic people especially Gypsies and Travellers in
other countries. Within the E.U., Travellers and
Gypsies currently form a population of over one million
people. Another million live in Eastern Europe.
These groups have faced, and still face, vicious
persecution and racism which reached its peak this
century with the murder of over a quarter of a million
Gypsies and Travellers by the Nazis. Gypsies and
Travellers in Eastern Europe are experiencing brutal
racist attacks at the moment. Anti-immigrant agitation
and attacks are specifically directed at them in
several European countries.
Travellers' resistance
Organised resistance to their oppression is almost
certain to have existed at several points in their
history. However, the recorded history of this
illiterate, nomadic, despised group scarcely existed
until the early 1960's in this country. An English
journalist, Grattan Puxon, arrived here to live and was
immediately struck by the situation of the Travellers.
Over the next five years he was involved in organising
the Irish Traveller Community, which organised protests
and resisted evictions all over the country. Puxon
produced a number of pamphlets, the best known of which
was titled The Victims. This protest movement quickly
gained momentum, especially around the tactic of
resisting evictions. Support grew both from Travellers
themselves, and from students and some left wing
activists.
A large group of Travellers based at Cherry Orchard in
Dublin, where Puxon himself lived, built what was the
first Travellers' school on the site. Dublin
Corporation bulldozed it down within three weeks,
setting off a wave of protest marches and pickets.
The movement for civil rights for Travellers was
gaining strength and confidence and alarming the
Government. The Irish Traveller Community held a large
public rally at Ballinasloe fair in 1963 at which a
committee was elected and plans made to organise
throughout the country.
Around the same time, Gratton Puxon was arrested and
charged with possessing explosives. He was given the
choice of facing a lengthy jail sentence or leaving the
country. It was later revealed that the explosives had
been planted in his home by the police. Puxon left
Ireland in 1964. Dozens of Traveller families left
with him and went on to help form the Gypsy Council in
England, where they played a prominent role over the
next decade.
In Ireland, however, a deal had been done to allow a
group of clerics and wealthy philanthropists to
represent Travellers' interests. Called the Itinerant
Settlement Committee, this group sidetracked
Travellers' struggles into endless lobbying and charity
work. Over the next twenty years they ensured there
was little or no Traveller input into the matters that
concerned them.
The next sign of any independent resistance came in
1980 when a Traveller woman, Roselle McDonald, went to
court to try to stop the constant evictions from one
roadside camp to another which were a feature of
Travellers' lives. She won a ruling that Travellers
could not be evicted from local authority property
without being offered a suitable alternative. Although
it was hailed as a great victory at the time, in
practice it did not take the authorities long to find
ways around it. Usually this was achieved by simply
harassing the families through tactics like dumping
everything from rubbish to manure beside their
caravans. This left them with no option but to move.
In 1981, Dublin County Council tried to open the new
Tallaght By-pass, home to over 100 Traveller families,
without offering them any alternative site. The events
which followed in Tallaght were to be repeated on a
smaller scale all over the country. Local residents,
with the active support of some local politicians,
including a Fianna F?il councillor, organised protest
marches. Vigilante type gangs patrolled around all
open space in the area in order to force Travellers out
of Tallaght.
A small number of local activists joined with a small
number of Travellers to resist this racism and formed
the Travellers' Rights Committee. This committee
existed for almost two years until it gave way to the
first ever 'Traveller only' organisation, Minceir
Misli, set up in 1983. The Travellers Rights Committee
put up a Traveller candidate, Nan Joyce, in the general
election of 1982. She ran against the
straightforwardly racist 'community' candidate who
stood on a ticket of "Get the Knackers out of Tallaght"
. She got twice as many first preference votes. A few
weeks after the election Nan Joyce was arrested and
charged with theft of jewellery. This was widely
reported in the papers with headlines such as "Tinker
Queen arrested for theft". The charges were dropped
because of lack of evidence when it came to court. It
turned out that the stolen jewellery had been planted
in her caravan by the police themselves in an exact
repetition of the frame up they had done on Grattan
Puxon over twenty years previously.
The protests against Travellers in Tallaght were
threatening and violent affairs. Leaflets were
distributed in the doors advising men to leave women
and children at home and to bring hurley sticks. No
Travellers were physically attacked on these protests,
mainly because of the small but highly visible and
determined pickets supporting the Travellers.
Minceir Misli lasted almost two years. During this
time it organised protest marches, hunger strikes,
pickets, and spoke at numerous meetings around the
country to galvanise support for Travellers' demands.
They initiated contact with the trade unions and, in
some unions, got resolutions passed instructing members
not to take part in evictions.
However, Minceir Misli was outside consensus politics
from the outset and as such could not get access to any
funding to carry out its work. In addition, almost all
its members were illiterate which made it extremely
difficult for them to function effectively. When it
folded, the Dublin Travellers' Education and
Development Group (DTEDG) was formed in 1984. However,
this group was not set up as an agitational one, so
there was a vacuum in Traveller resistance once again.
The Irish Travellers' Movement (ITM) was set up in 1990
as a lobby and pressure group composed of both settled
people and Travellers. However, its interventions to
date have been characterised by extreme caution. There
is no group with a direct action focus at the moment,
even though the number of physical and racist attacks
have escalated over the past two years.
There have been so many attacks over the past two years
that it would take many more pages to list them all.
It should be remembered that the Traveller population
is very small, so that the impact of this level of
physical attacks on such a small community is intense.
It generates fear within the whole group and causes
further isolation. The better known incidents include:
Bray, Co. Wicklow: Traveller family burnt out of their
caravan parked on the edge of a housing estate. Their
van was then burnt. Protests prevented them from being
offered another site locally. This happened in February
1995.
Glenamaddy, Co. Galway: In April 1994, Travellers were
subjected to an organised attack by local people armed
with hurley sticks and clubs. Travellers drinking in
the Four Roads pub were lined up by police and thrown
out to a 'lynch mob' of locals. Their vans were turned
over and wrecked. One Traveller woman described hiding
out in a field all night with her young daughter in
fear of being attacked. This episode was provoked by
the fact that the owner of this pub persisted in
serving Travellers despite police threats, which
eventually succeeded, that she would lose her licence.
Most recently, in June 1995 a Traveller family housed
in Moate Co. Westmeath have been the focus of anti-
Traveller racism. Locals here held public meetings and
blocked the main Galway to Dublin road in protest
against the Council's decision to house the Travellers
a mile outside "their" town. Travellers were called
"inferior people".
The only response from the establishment to this latest
outrage was an intervention by the Catholic Bishop (who
"understood" the bigots concerns). Anti-racist
activity was restricted to a spate of letters and
articles in the papers. A situation such as this
requires a direct action response but no group is
currently in a position to organise it.
Why this increase in Racism?
There has been some speculation in the papers (Fintan
O'Toole, Irish Times 16.6.95) about the increase in
anti-Traveller agitation over the past two years or so.
The fact is that such agitation and bigotry was always
there and has surfaced on numerous occasions.
Travellers housed in Rahoon in Galway twenty five years
ago were subjected to such harassment that the term
"Rahoonery" became part of the vocabulary for a time.
Travellers in other parts of the country had gunfire
directed at them and pig slurry thrown over their
caravans.
There seems to have been an increase in racist attacks
but this could also be that they are being reported
more. The struggles of the various groups described in
the previous section for civil rights for Travellers
has undoubtedly increased awareness of these issues
among people generally. Over the past ten years the
emergence of a small number of articulate, politically
active Travellers has raised the issue higher on the
political agenda. The concepts of ethnic identity and
cultural difference have also raised the temperature of
the debate. Until fairly recently, Travellers and
their supporters were essentially fighting for little
more than an end to the worst forms of discrimination.
In many cases, especially where middle class do-gooders
and liberal clergy were involved, they were appealing
to a charity motivation.
However the situation is now very different with
Traveller groups throughout the country asserting
their right to be treated with respect as an ethnic and
cultural minority with their own beliefs, customs and
values. By adopting this strategy, Travellers are
finally aligning themselves with the struggles of
nomadic and indigenous peoples everywhere. Apart from
their close affinity with Gypsies and Travellers
worldwide, their struggles now have much in common with
those of Native Americans, Aboriginal peoples in
Australia, and Maoris of New Zealand, as well as
indigenous people in South America. It is this new
and very unacceptable (to the bigots) demand for
respect as a cultural and ethnic minority that has
fuelled the latest outburst of racism against them.
Over the past decade, these concepts gained credibility
with a wider range of people. Racist descriptions and
abuse in the media have been consistently challenged,
with the result that Travellers rights as a separate
minority group had begun to gain acceptance in wider
circles. Once it was no longer acceptable to define
them either as objects of charity or as failed settled
people in need of social work and rehabilitation, the
alternative was to accept them as different with all
the rights and appropriate services they require to
live decently in accordance with their cultural values.
That such a prospect has proved to be totally
unacceptable to many settled people is obvious.
Fianna F?il Senator Marian McGennis, interviewed for a
recent survey stated that Martin Collins, a Traveller
activist closely associated with the concepts of
cultural and ethnic identity, was responsible for all
the anti-Traveller feeling and agitation in the country
because he insisted in demanding rights for Travellers!
Ridiculous though this statement is, it captures what
many settled people really feel.
Ironically, settled society has always considered
Travellers to be both different and inferior. Now
that Travellers are asserting their right to be
different but not inferior, they have provoked outrage.
Issues for Travellers
The key issues for Travellers remain the standard ones
of civil rights campaigns: decent appropriate
accommodation, access to good quality appropriate
education - including adult education because so many
of them missed out completely on education as children,
appropriate easily accessible health care, and equality
of access to all public and private services on a non-
discriminatory basis. Central to all these demands is
the recognition and resourcing of their cultural
identity.
Effective anti-racist and anti-discrimination
legislation is put forward as a solution to some of the
problems Travellers face but the history of legislation
such as the 1967 Race Relations Act in Britain shows
that this is no solution. Self-determination is
another key issue for Travellers and is complicated by
the fact that so many adult Travellers have little or
no formal education. The fact that they are such a tiny
minority also means that they need the support of other
more powerful forces in their struggle.
Current Stratergies
Strategies being pursued by the ITM and most of the
Traveller support groups are similar to those pursued
by all of the major movements for social change over
the past fifty years. Lobbying, influencing policy and
legislation, public awareness and education through the
media and through workshops and seminars aimed at
different groups within the community along with
consciousness raising and training for Travellers are
the main activities of these groups. There has been
some direct action too with pickets of insurance
companies who refuse to insure Travellers and several
protest marches against the continued lack of
accommodation and civil rights.
However, these actions have been few, especially in
view of the recent blatant and vicious rise in racist
attacks. Whatever mood for radical and direct action
strategies there is among Travellers themselves has
been mostly neutralised by professional community
workers. A great deal of faith has been invested in
such activities as the Government's Task Force on the
Traveller community, which published its report this
summer after nearly two years deliberation. This is
despite the fact that there have been reports before,
as long ago as the 1963 "Report of the Commission on
Itinerancy" which produced nothing useful or effective.
A great deal of energy and time has been diverted into
this kind of tactic at the expense of building up a
strong, assertive direct action movement among
Travellers and their supporters.
Throughout Europe there is some mobilisation taking
place among Gypsy and Traveller groups but most of this
is now of a defensive nature. Three Gypsies were
killed by a bomb thrown into their site in Austria
earlier this year by neo-nazis. Two of those killed
were survivors of the nazi death camps where a quarter
of a million Gypsies and Travellers were murdered.
This outrage did not even make the papers here. In most
countries Gypsies and Travellers are so despised that
events such as these are not reported even by the left
wing press. Racism against Travellers in Europe has
increased with the opening up of Eastern Europe where
there has always been a very large Gypsy and Traveller
population living in oppressed and poverty stricken
conditions. Thousands of these people are now trying
to move into Western Europe to achieve a better life.
They are the first of these immigrants to be harassed
and sent back and physically attacked and even killed
when they do manage to get into Germany or any other
western country.
In France, Gypsies and Travellers cannot be citizens of
the state. They cannot have passports, only travel
papers which they must register with the police when
they want to travel outside France. Even within,
France they must register with the police when they
travel. In Austria, the Catholic Church set up a
special organisation called Pro Juventute to kidnap the
children of Gypsies and Travellers and gave them as
slave labour to Austrian farmers. This practice went
on into the 1970s and was justified by spokespeople for
the church even later. The Austrian Gypsy population
was almost wiped out by this practise with Gypsy
parents spending years vainly trying to find their
children whose names and identies had been changed.
The situation of Irish Travellers is now one of crisis
on several fronts. Basic accommodation, education and
health needs are hopelessly inadequate despite the tiny
size of the Traveller population. But it is on the
ideological level that the real crisis is located with
the assertion of cultural and ethnic rights by
Travellers on the one hand and the total rejection of
the implications of these demands by much of settled
society.
Travellers' struggle for civil rights should be seen in
the context of all the major social and political
movements of the past fifty years and not as something
separate or peculiar to Ireland or to Irish Travellers.
Their struggles bear remarkable resemblance to those of
Native Americans and indigenous peoples throughout the
world.
These struggles have to be situated in a context of
racism, and the strategies devised must be equal to the
challenge of racism. The direct involvement of
Travellers themselves in determining specific
strategies and tactics is essential, both because
anarchists believe that all peoples should control the
decisions that effect them and because it is Travellers
who have to live with the consequences of such actions.
These consequences can include increased harassment and
attacks.
Travellers need the active support of progressive
forces such as the organised labour movement if they
are to succeed in their struggle. Links need to be
made with the struggles of working class people and
their communities on a range of issues which effect
them both. Travellers are often used by local and
national politicians as a scapegoat and a distraction
away from real demands about conditions in working
class communities.
This cynical strategy of deflecting working class anger
onto Travellers is unfortunately often successful as we
have seen in Tallaght, Blanchardstown and Navan in the
recent past. It needs to be challenged and exposed for
what it is - playing the racist card in local politics.
Traveller organisations need to take up the challenge
to engage in direct action strategies if real gains are
to be made.
The history of social movements such as the Black
movement, the Women's movement and the Gay movement
shows that serious gains will not be won by lobbying
alone. The Traveller movement is no different and
these lessons need to taken on board by groups working
for Travellers' rights. What is needed now is a strong
Traveller-directed, direct action campaign to seriously
challenge the racism at the root of all Travellers'
inequalities. The WSM is committed to such a campaign
and urges others committed to the basic principle of
"Traveller control over the decisions made in such a
campaign" to become involved in this struggle.