      ******* 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.


