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An Unsettled People: Rural Nomads Seek a Place in Modern Ireland
| Article
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10728 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
2,782 Words |
| Author
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Amy Seidman
Amy Seidman is a photojournalist who resides in Culver City,
California. |
They are Ireland's unrecognized minority-homeless and ostracized. Despite public disapproval, their family groups wander the Irish countryside. Other than a limited number of official halting sites they have no place to stop. Most live by the side of the road. They bathe, eat, and sleep in public. They live without electricity or permanent running water, bathing facilities, or toilets. Their child-mortality rate is similar to those in Third World countries, and there is a 98 percent illiteracy rate among adults. According to the Economic and Social Research Institute's 1985 report, "The circumstances of the Irish Traveling People are intolerable. No humane and decent society once made aware of such circumstances could permit them to persist."
But although local political groups and organizations have expressed the need to create permanent housing for the Travelers (most commonly described as "gypsies" or "tinkers"), the settled community prefers what Traveler Nell McDonaugh calls an "unspoken segregation." Travelers are evicted from areas not designated as official halting sites, and grassy lanes that Traveler groups have frequented for years are blocked and barred. Most official halting sites are located in undesirable, often industrial, areas.
Most settled people want nothing to do with Travelers draw the dole (welfare) in more than one county at a time, are troublemakers, and leave piles of garbage in their wake. Many local people are opposed to having halting sites in their vicinity. Why should "respectable" people support itinerants?
But these "homeless" outcasts have filled a social niche in Ireland for centuries. Theirs may be a distinct life-style, and their traditions are unlike those of other Irish, but they are, nonetheless, Irish. In a traditionally rural society, Travellers served acceptable social purposes as itinerant farm workers, metal craftsmen, lace makers, and storytellers. But in today's settled, urban society, this integrated group of nomads are a people displaced by and at odds with contemporary expectations. They are a community without a place in its homeland and a cultural group in danger of losing its identity.
Traditional craftsmen
Before automobiles, television, telephones, and mass production, Travellers provided essential goods and services to isolated communities. George and Sharon Gmelsh described the Travellers in their 1988 article "Nomads in Cities": "Gypsies were rural people who lived in the
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