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Title: Who are the Travellers? Author: Patricia McCarthy Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: travellers, Ireland, Workers Solidarity Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from http://struggle.ws/ws95/who46.html Notes: Published in Workers Solidarity No. 46 — Autumn 1995.
ARE TRAVELLERS a distinct “ethnic” group with their own traditions and
customs? Very few people want to accept that they are. This reflects the
widespread racism towards them, a racism which insists on seeing them as
“failed settled people”. They are seen as “problems” rather than a
people who have been denied even the most basic rights.
Irish Travellers are a very small minority group, constituting less than
1% of the population. Their numbers currently stand at approximately
23,000 people in the 26 counties and another 1,500 in the North. There
are also an estimated 15,000 Irish Travellers in Britain and 7,000 in
the U.S.A.
The criteria internationally accepted as defining ethnicity are:
Irish Travellers meet all these criteria.
Travellers are often segregated into separate classes in school. They
are banned from almost every pub in the country. They are routinely
refused service in shops, cafes, cinemas, laundrettes and clubs. Social
contact with settled people is minimal because Travellers have been
denied 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. For
others, 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 80% of the adults are
illiterate.
Within the EU, Travellers and Gypsies currently form a population of
over one million people. Another million live in Eastern Europe. These
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. Today in Eastern Europe they are
experiencing brutal racist attacks.
Over the past decade we have seen the emergence of a small number of
articulate, politically active Travellers. Until fairly recently,
Travellers and their supporters were essentially fighting for little
more than an end to the very worst forms of discrimination.
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. It is this new and very unacceptable demand for respect as a
cultural and ethnic minority that has fuelled the latest outburst of
racism against them.
In recent years, these concepts have gained acceptance from a growing
number of people. Racist descriptions and abuse on TV and in the
newspapers have been challenged, with the result that Travellers’ rights
— as a separate minority group — have 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. Such an idea really annoyed the
bigots.
Ironically, settled society has always considered Travellers to be
different. Now that Travellers are asserting their right to be different
but not inferior, they have provoked outrage. Travellers’ struggles 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 Irish Travellers. Their struggles
bear remarkable resemblence to those of Native Americans and Indigenous
peoples throughout the world.
Anarchists have no great interest in who belongs to which ethnic group,
except in so far as each tradition adds to a rich cultural diversity.
But we do understand that there will be no real equality until racism is
uprooted, and all people are accorded the dignity they deserve. Equality
is certainly not about trying to make people deny their own history and
heritage.