Someone I know bought a derelict cottage recently. He was working on it at weekends, and one weekend the copper-piping for the plumbing was delivered to the site. A local came up to see him and said that Travellers had been noticed looking at the copper. So he slept in the shell of the building for a few nights until all the copper had been installed and the place was secure.
When he told me this little story he said to me: “I’m only telling you this in private. I’d never say it in public.” In other words, he’s a decent man who wouldn’t dream of contributing to the anti-Traveller feeling around. On the other hand, he unhesitatingly believed that the Travellers were going to steal the copper.
There are not many subjects on which such doublethink is commonplace. Abortion is similar, in the passions it arouses and the absence of a middle ground. But liberals here are actually more free to express their views on abortion than on the Travelling people. They may have worries about the whole Travelling way of life, and fear an element within the Travelling people. But they will not give voice to any of this, for fear of being seen to line up with the vociferous minority which would be glad to see the Travellers in punishment camps, and their women sterilized.
Thus, the argument about Travellers polarizes people into those who hate them, and those who are driven by that hate into a blanket defense of the Travelling people which ordinary people cannot quite accept. Claims are made for the Travelling way of life which settled people, by definition, cannot understand. And the Travellers are charged with so many and such horrible crimes by their detractors that their defenders have to deny any criminality at all.
Dublin County Council recently had a special meeting about their plan for halting sites. During the meeting, one councillor said that there was a fear among settled communities that the presence of Travellers would lead to an increase of rape and in attacks on old people. He was shouted down, and withdrew the remark.
I’m glad that he did so. But it is more of the doublespeak. He was only reporting, accurately, what some people do fear. If those fears didn’t exist there would be no problem. But the fact is that there is a problem. I don’t see what is gained by acknowledging the problem, but refusing to acknowledge the reasons for it.
I have never had the opportunity of knowing a Traveller on equal terms. The closest I’ve come was a settled Traveller I met in Cork. She always kept her hand over her mouth, because her lips were split and her teeth missing, thanks to her late husband. But she was the gentlest, most good-humored of women. When I met her, her children were teaching her to read and write and she was learning at a great rate, because she wanted to be able to help them at their homework.
Just one meeting like that can dissolve the stereotypes. But anyone with eyes in their head can see the healthy children and the spotless caravans that some Travellers can manage to present in seas of mud and in rain and frost. And anyone can listen. More and more, Travellers’ own voices are being heard. There was a young woman on the Gay Byrne Show not long ago, talking to him about the way Travellers handle courtship and marriage. She was wonderful. If anything, she was patronizing the rest of us.
If this smacks of a naive plea to recognize the humanity of the Travellers, that is because their enemies deny their humanity, so you have to start the discussion at zero. “Animals,” people say. “Savages.” “They’ve all got AIDS.” Journalists get long, usually anonymous, letters about the filth of the Travellers, their neglect of their children, their thieving ways, the viciousness of their assaults, the way they terrorize old people all over the country. Usually, one thing has been done to the writer by a Traveller, or someone thought to be a Traveller. And in their distress and fear they see Travellers everywhere and crime everywhere and the whole of living ruined for everyone by all Travellers.
You can assert to such people that Travellers are humans, that they are our fellow Irish people, and are, on the whole, as law-abiding as the settled people, on the whole, are. But this cuts no ice. The one thing that stops the tirade is to point out that which is self-evidently true: the babies of Travellers come into the world as innocent as you or I, and whatever it is that goes wrong happens in and through society.
Almost the whole of Travellers’ lives is on view. A man beats his wife in the street and a hundred people see. Settled wife-beating happens behind closed doors. The Travellers line up outside the employment exchange with bottles of wine in their hands, or sit in their vans swigging from the bottles. Meanwhile thousands and thousands of settled people are drinking in pubs or in front of the telly or handing around the sherries. Many people neglect their children, but hardly anyone knows. Yet everyone sees the Travelling children sniffingglue. Everyone sees the women with sunburnt babies sitting all day in front of a cardboard box.
Everyone can identify a Traveller at once, the weatherbeaten faces and the motley clothes. Their beautiful women and children, such as Nan Joyce and her children, have a special sort of beauty. So the Travellers have no privacy from us. They are “other.” Their otherness is more than disquieting: between us and them there is an abyss of understanding, and in that abyss the nightmares about their nature swirl. What you have no understanding of you can endow with any feature.
It is this mythic element that makes reasonable planning for the Travellers so difficult. Because, on the face of it, the problem they present is soluble, and it should be possible to bring about an Ireland where everyone has access to water and sanitation, and where we, the comfortable ones, don’t have to put the others out of our minds on cold winter nights. There are about 12,000 persons – persons, not families – on the road or staying at halting sites. Even if that figure is a great underestimate, that’s still a very small number of people. There are millions of us – surely it is possible to set up a network of sites and schemes where Travellers can escape from the degraded living conditions which we impose on them, and then calmly blame them for?
Or, do we want to go on like this forever? The argument for compassion has never worked: we’ve accepted for decades that Travelling children suffer and die in far greater numbers than our children, and not many people care.
But what about the argument from self-interest? The very people who most loathe and fear the Travellers must see that the cycle has to be broken sometime. They must see that while attitudes to the Travellers remain so hostile, Traveller children are born to alienation, born to be increasingly hardened by their experience of life, born to grow up unable to like or pity or make common cause with their oppressors. “Why don’t they do something? Why don’t they understand us?” some settled people cry. But truly, what society has done to them is so much worse than what they do back, and all of us are so multiply advantaged compared to them, that it will take a long process of reparation before we can talk of mutuality.
The Irish Times, July 10, 1989