The bus driver also wanted to show me where they—some Travellers, but to him all Travellers—had broken into a water-pipe, “and if you or I did it we’d be punished for it.” He seemed as furious that they weren’t paying for the water as that his friend’s son had died. We passed a wide lawn with a row of little concrete plugs along its perimeter to prevent any Travellers from pulling over to camp and, on the other side of the road, a pipe pointing straight up and trickling water and an encampment of a few trailers with debris scattered around them. If this is what freeloading looked like, it didn’t look very luxurious. He finally let me go on a nondescript road with directions to walk down it until I saw the prison—and the admonition, Be careful, it’s a mugger’s paradise. With its weedy bulldozer heaps and brand new rows of identical houses, it looked more like the road to nowhere, and I set off down it with my offering of peaches and cherries weighing heavier and heavier on this hot June day.
All along my meander up the west coast the people I met had been murmuring stray facts and opinions about Travellers, as Ireland’s indigenous nomadic people are currently called. A woman who apparently lived in a trailer herself, outside one of the hostels in Bantry, had told me that they were grand people if you got to know them, though few enough did. While I was walking with the giantess in Ennis a sandyhaired boy of nine or ten had begged change from us and acknowledged he was a Traveller when I gave him a coin, but he was too cringing to tell me more. When the man who drove me to Galway had exhausted the subject of stone walls I’d asked him about Travellers. He told me a story about how Galway is divided into four quadrants, and each quadrant had been shirking responsibility for building a halting site for Travellers for so long that the bishop of Galway had offered the land next to his palace. I had seen Travellers’ big black and white carthorses grazing by the dump near Portumna and a long row of trailers on the narrow shoulder of the road back to Galway. Sister Kathleen had said her family always had a load of turf or a can of milk for the Travellers who came by the farm when she was a girl and they were called Tinkers. Bride in Westport had amplified that, saying the primitiveness of the Travellers’ lifestyle was only contextual and recent; she herself had grown up in a farmhouse without running water, and they got along well with the Travellers who came along then. Later on, Lee in Ballydehob wrote me a letter about encountering a Travelling man who was standing up in his cart and driving his team of heavy horses at a full gallop, with a gleam of joy and sense of power in his face, and their eyes met in a moment of camaraderie and recognition. Hated, isolated, and sometimes admired, but why?
Finding out in Dublin wasn’t as easy as I thought. Although everyone in Ireland and Great Britain seems to know about Travellers—know at least more than I did, and as much as they thought necessary—no one seems to think the subject is interesting, and little has been written on them. They seem neither exotic enough to garner much anthropological attention nor homogeneous enough to be included in national folklore researches; and virtually no books had been written about them before the 1970s, and few enough after that. My first foray in Dublin was instead an education in how the nonnomadic community responds to them. None of the major libraries seemed to have useful books, and the Irish newspapers were not indexed or microfilmed. After I found the one book available on Travellers in the biggest bookstore downtown—a vivid oral history by a Traveller woman, Nan Joyce, who’s become a Travellers’ rights advocate—I talked my way into the archives of The Irish Times.
The Irish Times is the weightiest, most official-seeming national newspaper, like The Times of London and The New York Times. The head archivist was very obliging on the telephone and invited me to come up to the clipping room. He sighed when I got there, and told me how behind the times Ireland was technologically—You wouldn’t believe how recently the paper stopped using hot type, he said, then showed me how they kept track of stories. A few people with big shears sat at cluttered desks, dissecting each day’s newspaper and pasting the sorted-out stories into a whole library of colossal scrapbooks with their subjects handwritten along the spine, and bits of newspaper lay everywhere like autumn leaves. I sat down to read the last year in the public lives of the Irish Travellers, and as stiff page after page of clippings went by like entries in a national diary, a picture of a civil rights war formed.
On July 13, 1993, a shop on Grafton Street had refused to sell ice cream to a Traveller boy. On October 13, fourteen windows were smashed and two vans overturned at Four Roads Pub in Glenmaddy, County Galway, by a crowd of more than a hundred people angry about the presence of Travellers. On October 23, The Irish Times declared there were, according to 1992 figures, about 23,000 Travellers in Ireland in 3,828 families, and more than 1,100 lived on the roadside—that is, as nomads. “There are also believed to be about 15,000 Irish-born Travellers living in Britain and 10,000 Travellers of Irish descent in the U.S.” On November 6, the news was that “Clubs, public houses, and shops will be barred from discriminating against Travellers under legislation being prepared by the Department of Equality and Law Reform,” which told me in a round-about way that such discrimination existed and was legal.
On November 15, “The dumping of dozens of mounds of a foul-smelling fertilizer beside Travellers’ caravans on the Fonthill road in North Clondalkin last week has aroused anger among the Travellers there, who claim the dumping is a thinly disguised attempt by Dublin County Council to force them to move.” This, I would find, was a common story; roadside Ireland’s landscape was being redesigned with barriers of stone and earth to eliminate the Travellers who hadn’t been eliminated by regulations; a whole zone between those in motion and those in homes was being eliminated. On January 18, 1994, The Irish Times noted, “Tension, and sometimes open conflict, between the travelling and settled communities have been long-standing blemishes on society in this State.” The following day provided an example: “Publican Threatened with Loss of Her License for Serving Travellers,” said the headline. On February 8, the bishop of Galway had donated land beside his residence for six families’ halting site. On February 28, the Irish Traveller Movement itself became embroiled in controversy “over one of its key policies, that Travellers should be regarded as a distinct ethnic group.”
But the biggest and nastiest story in The Irish Times was the most recent. In Navan, County Meath, I gathered from the spotty coverage, a group of twenty-six Traveller families had camped next to a school and attempted to enroll their children in it. On April 27, the paper reported, “Mrs. Nell McDonagh sat in her car yesterday morning, crying. She came to remove her child Steven (15). . . .‘on the day people are getting the vote in South Africa, why should we have to take our children out of a school? You cannot force your child into a situation where they are not wanted.’ ” The following day the news was that “about 350 students not taking exams have been with drawn from the school in protest at the continuing presence of the 26 Travelling families outside the school gates,” apparently in a bid to shut the school down or at least keep it segregated. On May 2, the news got rougher. “Some 40 local residents protested at the Travellers’ move into the town’s one official site on the Athboy Road, and while there was no violence, gardai [Ireland’s police] said the protest was ‘pretty tense’ at times . . . The chairman of the Combined Residents Association, Mr. Andrew Brennan, said the situation with the Travellers was a ‘powder keg,’ adding that the Travellers were claiming to be law-abiding citizens, overlooking the torment and harassment they had forced on people living near them. At Mass yesterday, priests around Navan called for ‘restraint, compassion and tolerance’ with in the community and condemned the petrol bomb attack in Mr. Stokes’ caravan. A number of people left the churches in protest.” They were minor stories, not front-page news or features or exposés, just chronicles of every-day conflict, and in my later readings I found that such incidents had been common since at least the sixties. In the early seventies four hundred people had marched to keep a Mrs. Furey and her three children out
of the Shantalla suburb of Galway, while locals had burned down a house in Moate, County Westmeath, to keep another Travelling family from moving in.
All this news did something to the Irish charm and hospitality I’d met with and all the Irish charity evident in the public concern and relief efforts for exotic crises—didn’t undo it but complicated it, like a seam of glittering quartz running through soft granite. To me it was puzzling that the conflict was so widely regarded as insignificant, because it recalled the American civil rights issues of the 1950s and 1960s, when the relationship between races became a national test of values and identity. I wondered whether the Irish have been so used to being history’s victims that they can’t imagine themselves as the victors, whether the conflict in the North has been so emblematic for many Irish and Irish Americans because it allows them to continue to imagine themselves as the persecuted minority seventy years after Irish Catholics became the ruling majority in the other twenty-six counties. With in those counties it’s the realm of sexual morality—a sad parade in recent years of priests’ mistresses and molestees, farm girls strangling illegitimate babies, incest and arguments about divorce and abortion—that brings on national soul-searching, as though the Republic were a postpolitical realm in which only private life remained for the public conscience to address. But the conflict over Travellers’ rights is about public space and institutions.
All over Europe, similar versions of the conflict between nomads and the sedentary majority are taking place, and though nomad sympathizers and supporters exist, they are themselves often a minority. Nomads are literally unsettling for sedentary populations, or at least those intent on ethnic nationalism. They move through the continuous landscape of roads rather than with in the closed loop of borders, stitching the distances together with their circuits. If nomads are indigenous they disturb the idea of a homogeneous folk with roots in the native soil; if they’re not, they’re considered invaders—and in many places, several centuries of residence haven’t qualified Gypsies as natives in the eyes of their neighbors and sometimes their governments. “Their very existence constituted dissidence,” Jean-Pierre Liégeois says of Gypsies, and death, imprisonment, expulsion, enslavement, and forced settlement are among the punishments that have been meted out for nomadism in Europe.
From The Irish Times I also garnered the addresses of the principal Travellers’ rights organizations in the country. There I finally began to see something of the culture that was eliciting this upheaval. At the Dublin Travellers Education and Development Group, on a seedy square outside the center of town, the organizers showed me slides and sold me books and introduced me to the shy Traveller girl who worked downstairs with her brother, gathering and redistributing scraps and remnants the schools used as art supplies. She replied reluctantly to my questions and then suddenly proffered the statement that Traveller society was like Moslem society in its constraints upon women. At the Parish of the Travelling People on Cook Street—a parish without borders, founded because the geographically defined parishes didn’t serve Travellers’ needs—back near the Liffey and the center of town, they ushered me into their library and let me photocopy away.
A garrulous priest’s assistant kept interrupting my reading with stories of his own about working with Travellers. They were, he told me, devout, but magical in their beliefs: more interested in the sacraments and miracles of the church than in the morality, and they often sent their children to school only long enough to receive the instructions necessary for first communion (which is provided by the schools, in this nation of linked church and state). He had seen schools in which the Traveller children were sequestered in rooms with heavy curtains and given different schedules from the rest, and less rigorous classes, lest other parents with draw their children as they had in Navan. And he told me more, about the tradition of first-cousin marriage and of marrying very young—fifteen or sixteen for the girls—and of the way the parish was trying to discourage these customs. He spoke of Travellers fondly, as though they were children, good but in need of guidance. And the efficient women behind the desks in the other room sent in Cathleen McDonagh, a Travelling woman of about my age, from whom I learned the most, the one who invited me to Clondalkin in the Dublin suburbs.
The background that came to me piecemeal, through all my hunting in Dublin and long afterward at home, looks something like this: no one knows exactly at what point Travellers emerged from the rest of Irish society. The term Traveller itself has been accepted in the last few decades as the Travellers’ own more civil alternative to Tinker, a word which like Negro has become derogatory, and to itinerant, with its social-worker overtones. Too, Travelling, as it is sometimes capitalized, is foundational to the group’s distinct identity, unlike the fading craft of tinsmithing or tinkering. Those who consider nomadism a deviant or dissolute way of life often suggest that Travellers are nothing more than refugees from the economic crises of the potato Famine and perhaps of Cromwell, people who took to the road as beggars and don’t know how to get off the road. The idea that it is a very recent way of life or not a way of life, a culture, at all, that it is only a crisis condition of marginal and subnormal people, accords well with the idea that Travelling is a problem to which integration into sedentary life is the solution. A group of Travellers emigrated to the United States during the Famine and remains a distinct group in Georgia, retaining some of the nomadism, language, and other ethnic hallmarks, making it clear that the culture or ethnicity was fully developed a century and a half ago.
Travellers themselves sometimes tell a story akin to that of the Wandering Jew, in which they are the descendants of the metalworker who made the nails for the Crucifixion and for that deed were sentenced to wander the earth until the end of time. In her study of Travellers, Artelia Court proposes possible links to the outcasts and wandering craftspeople of pre-Christian Celtic society in Ireland. External evidence suggests that some version of the Travellers existed as far back as the twelfth century, when references to “tinklers” and “tynkers” appear; an English law against “wandering Irish” was passed in 1243. Travellers have a language or dialect of their own called cant, shelta, or gammon, which scrambles words of Irish and English derivation, and one of the strongest arguments for the ancientness of the culture is that their word for priest, cuinne, is an old term for druids, otherwise known only from ancient manuscripts. Other linguistic elements suggest roots before the twelfth century. But all the evidence is slight: there are clearly wandering craftspeople and beggars and references that mingle Gypsies and Tinkers from the sixteenth century onward, but there are few details. Tinkers are not Gypsies; they are as fair-skinned and Catholic as anyone in Ireland, and it has been proposed that though Gypsies spread all the way from their origins in India to England, they never reached Ireland because their commercial-nomad niche was already filled by Tinkers. At the turn of the twentieth century, Synge wrote of Tinkers along with all other denizens of the road, but the distinctions are blurred. It seems as though so many groups were wandering the roads for so many reasons that Travellers didn’t stand out very dramatically, until everyone else stopped moving.
It is now a matter of debate whether they constitute a distinct ethnic group. Some Travellers seem to want the legal protection and cultural recognition such an identity would confer; others, to think that such status would further alienate them from the mainstream of Irish life. In their report on the ethnic issue, the National Federation of the Irish Travelling People declared, “In their deep religious feeling, generosity and attachment to the family, Travellers have clung to aspects of Irish life to a far greater extent than the settled community.” Much of what the sedentary Irish say about the Travellers is what the English and Anglo-Americans once said about the Irish: they drink, they brawl, they have too many children and too little work ethic, they’re improvident, dirty, and lawless. The very terms in which the sedentary speak suggest that the Travellers have preserved the tribal and not yet European culture of an earl
ier Ireland.
Kerby Miller, in his history of Irish emigration to North America, writes about the ways in which the Catholic Irish were at odds with the industrial and Protestant-dominated societies they found themselves in: they “seemed so premodern that to bourgeois observers from business-minded cultures, the native Irish often appeared ‘feckless,’ ‘childlike’ and ‘irresponsible’ . . . The shrewdest recognized that ancient communal values and work habits persisted despite commercialization . . . In addition, the Catholic lower classes seemed to lack bourgeois concepts of time and deferred gratification . . .” Court writes of the “antiquated traditions and artifacts that had vanished elsewhere but which Ireland possessed in abundance” after the Second World War, adding, “And even among these countrymen the Tinkers were conspicuous for remaining doggedly true to themselves.” “We are Irish,” insisted placards at some Travellers’ rights demonstrations in the 1980s, since their differences from the mainstream were regarded as alien rather than anachronistic. It may be that the Travellers stand out for not having changed enough in a society that has transformed itself radically in the last several decades.
Though possessing ancient origins may, for the sedentary scholars of Travellers, confer greater legitimacy on them, it is apparently of less interest to the subjects themselves. The authenticity of origins, the historical basis for identity, may not be their method. That notion more than almost anything convinced me that they did constitute a distinct culture or subculture in this history-haunted place. The anthropologist Sinéad Ní Shuinear writes, “Some nomadic peoples—the Jews of the Old Testament spring immediately to mind—cultivate both literacy and historical memory. Others, even without literacy, enshrine genealogy and significant events into formal litanies to be memorised and passed on verbatim by specialists. But others still—and this includes most commercial nomadic groups—treat the past itself as a sort of baggage which would tie them down in the present. Instead, they cultivate an intense present-time orientation, living in a perpetual now, deriving their sense of identity not from taproots deep into the past, but from vast networks of living kin. The essence of Gypsy and Traveller culture is its fluidity. Gypsies and Travellers everywhere are supremely indifferent to their own origins.” She cites the Italian anthropologist, Leonardo Piasere, who “argues that Gypsies and Travellers are not ignorant illiterates, but have very deliberately rejected literacy, knowing that it would solidify the past, thus imposing a baggage of precedent curtailing flexibility in the present.” Like the Western Shoshone and other nomads, Travellers traditionally destroy all the belongings of a person who has died, a process that tends to rule out heirlooms and vast accumulation, a means of keeping its practitioners even materially in the present.
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