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Title: Travellers Fight Back Author: Patricia McCarthy Date: 1996 Language: en Topics: Ireland, travellers, Red & Black Revolution, racism Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/rbr/travrbr2.html Notes: This article was originally printed in Red & Black Revolution no 2.
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;
reached in the 1940âs.
These are the statistics of racism, clearly demonstrating that
Travellersâ 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.
Travellers constitute a distinct ethnic group within Irish society. They
fulfil all the criteria internationally accepted as defining ethnicity:
community.
There has been strong resistance to acknowledging Travellersâ 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 Travellersâ 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.
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 1960âs 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 Travellersâ 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 Travellersâ interests. Called
the Itinerant Settlement Committee, this group sidetracked Travellersâ
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 Travellersâ 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 FĂĄil
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 Travellersâ Rights
Committee. This committee existed for almost two years until it gave way
to the first ever âTraveller onlyâ 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 âcommunityâ 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 Travellersâ 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 Travellersâ 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
Travellersâ 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 âlynch mobâ 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 Councilâs 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.
There has been some speculation in the papers (Fintan OâToole, 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 FĂĄil 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.
The key issues for Travellers remain the standard ones of civil rights
campaigns: decent appropriate accommodation, access to good quality
appropriate education â 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.
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 Governmentâs 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.
Travellersâ 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 â 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 Womenâs
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 Travellersâ rights.
What is needed now is a strong Traveller-directed, direct action
campaign to seriously challenge the racism at the root of all
Travellersâ 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.