Travellers' Rest

Controversy

(Under Construction)

The Theme:

I not deny
The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,
May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two
Guiltier than him they try.

William Shakespeare, from "Henry VIII"

A recent letter of comment to the Irish Times about anti-Traveller prejudice in Ireland, written by an Irish Traveller from Dublin:

CRITICISING TRAVELLERS

Sir, - In recent weeks your paper carried a negative piece about Travellers
(Kevin Myers, An Irishman's Diary, July 30th) and a letter from Mary
Gardiner (August 30th). As a Traveller and a member of the Irish Association
of Minority Ethnic Women, I would like to invite Mr. Myers and Ms. Gardiner to
live for a week in a Traveller site so that they can experience for
themselves what it means to live without running water, toilets, or refuse
collection.
Ms. Gardiner argues that Travellers cause "filth, dirt and litter" which they
leave to local authorities to clean up. I would challenge her to keep a site
clean with no bin collections, no running water and no toilets, and with
settled people dumping their own rubbish in skips on Travellers' sites. Many
of these sites are a disgrace; they are worse than many of the worst areas
of the Third World. And it is not as if settled people are so clean
themselves; as soon as the binmen go on strike, Irish streets become piles
of litter.
Mr. Myers and Ms. Gardiner say that Travellers refuse to work even now when
there is such a labour shortage. I would like them to tell me who will give
Travellers a job, when they are followed by security people even as they go
innocently into shops.
Finally, Ms. Gardiner criticises Traveller parents for making their children
beg, subjecting them to "emotional, physical slavery". Yes, there is a
minority of Traveller children who beg, usually because of severe hardship
at home, but anyone passing along any citycentre street knows that the
majority of beggars are settled people, mostly adults.
It does not befit The Irish Times to allow space for articles and letters
such as Mr. Myers's and Ms. Gardiner's, which contribute to anti-Traveller
racism and make the work of Traveller organisations much harder.

Yours, etc.,

NANCY COLLINS, Pavee Point, North Great Charles Street, Dublin

I want to thank Micheal O'hAodha of Limerick, Ireland, for relaying the above letter. A beautifully written work of well-reasoned clarity, it was an inspiration.

EDUCATION: Academia and the Irish Traveller

Frankly, the vast majority of readers might well skip the rest of this CONTROVERSY page. It contains references to people and studies that will be familiar only to a few select scholars and students. On the other hand, it is not presented as an academic paper but rather as an "OP-ED" essay by an interested and somewhat informed layman, so it probably will not satisfy the specialists among you either.

Some general background:

Truthfully, the academic establishment has always shortchanged the Traveller and vice-versa. The fact was that, in Ireland and originally in the USA, Irish Travellers were itinerant but honest craftsmen and merchants who traveled the same routes year after year. Education, or lack of it, contributed very little to their success, or lack of it. There are only occasional references to their way of life in history, mostly because history has never been about the common people but, unlike the Gypsies in 1505 (I think), there is no beginning to their record. They have always been in Ireland, I think, living much as they did 150 years ago, as I say, honestly. I apologize in advance if the names given below are unfamiliar to you but, if so, they're not important particularly, except to rather specialized scholars.

I'm a member (and webmaster) of the oldest group to attempt a systematic study of Irish Travellers, the Gypsy Lore Society, but I have little use for the techniques used by its original reporting scholars on the origin and nature of the Irish Travelling People and our language. Wandering Travellers were commonly referred to as "tramps," indigenous consultants as "informants" and, in one case, an otherwise undescribed Traveller is referred to as "a wretched outcaste, shewing(sic) withal some evidence of having had a fair amount of education." Truthfully, I can relate to that Traveller so described with a great deal of empathy. But how much reliability can anyone place on conclusions initiated with such premises?

As another such example, the oldest prop I know in connection with swindling is the Gladar-box, a device that would appear (at least to the simple-minded) to manufacture gold coins from solder. The so-called "Shelta" (another, similar bit of shoddy scholarship there) language was put through the hoops by Sampson to account for the source-word "gladar" which, in truth, I believe to be English Cant in origin, stemming from the Middle-English word "glad," meaning "bright and shiny." For so-called scholars to overlook that painfully obvious connection in order to fracture Gaelic into a presumed "Shelta" word for "skin" is nothing short of academic libel.

Aside from the raw collection of lexicological data (even that must be skeptically if not cynically considered), everything written by scholars about Travellers, from Leland in 1880 through at least the Gmelches and Harper in the '60s and '70s must be treated, IMHO, as highly suspect, tainted by having been filtered through rigid sedentary value-systems that equate nomads with failed and hopelessly corrupted "masterless men." Some would even consider Irish Travellers as "wanna-be" Gypsies, ignoring completely the history, legends and perhaps even the archeological record of Ireland. I have high hopes eventually in that regard for the Irish anthropologist, Sinead ni Shuinear. But a potential problem, it seems to me, is that her open-minded views on the origins and contemporary problems of Travellers in Ireland might have become unpopular in some quarters of an international academic specialty (I'm sure that "Gipsiology" is no longer PC) that seems fixated on problems facing Travelling People of all sorts, especially the Rroma (Gypsies) in Great Britain and on the European continent. Fine for them, but not so fine for Irish Travellers in Ireland and America.

Worst of all with respect to scholarship is the tendency (almost the requirement) of academia to treat prior sources as canonical, so that Leland and Sampson are universally cited, unquestioned, as "authorities" on "Shelta" and "Tinkers" based on a few scattered conversations with poorly-regarded Irish Travellers. More recently, in his paper, "Irish Traveler Cant: Its Evolution and Classification," Harper reiterated an implied claim he attributed to Leland that the rise of the railways coincided with a purported general breakdown in the social fabric of Irish Travellers during the 1830's. He blithely ignored the previous Penal Laws imposed upon all the Catholic Irish by the British, their repeal, the mass evictions of "tenants," and those effects on the immense general migrant population of the time. The implication that such a result as "the cohesiveness of tinker groups and the use of Shelta declined" might be expected as a result of the few miles of locomotive railroad track in use before 1840 in Ireland is astonishing beyond belief.

That was only one of a number of such egregious statements based on outright misinformation; yet today I frequently find Harper cited as an authority on all Irish Travellers. He assembled a lexicon of about 160 words in one dialect only of the Cant, using standard phonetic notation: that he did well; that I will give him. Otherwise, there is nothing useful that I have found in his work, especially his uninformed hypotheses on the origin, development and usage of the Cant.

Excerpts from a recent letter on the
subject of Ireland and its Travellers:

Dear __________,

I am going to make an effort in this letter to focus entirely on the "sheep vs. goats" issue you brought up. You'll notice I said "you brought up." I was discussing the rights and conditions of the Irish Travellers (hereafter referred to as "ITs") in all of Ireland. While sympathetic to the plight of many Gypsies, in my opinion the ITs have a much stronger and more readily attainable claim to redress from the Irish people to restore their access to once almost unrestricted common land and to improve their health care and educational services, adequately adapting them to an itinerant, even migratory, lifestyle. I think that once they have those minimum rights granted, ITs will eventually be able to make a good independent living (which is one way to define "viable"). Honestly, I fail to see how the Gypsies even enter into that endeavor intrinsically.

Basically, I-ATs and most Romanichal in the USA get along splendidly so this isn't our customary bigotry flexing its muscles. There is little or no contact with the more traditional Romany, however, and though proper respect is paid it's always paid at a distance, usually at funerals. Why? Because we have almost nothing in common except the fact that most of us are peripatetic, independent workers, and caste-wise we're both pretty low on the totem-pole in the eyes of the general public. Honestly, if you had a bunch of farmers from Bangladesh that had immigrated into Ireland over the preceding few years, would you tell the native Irish farmers that the government would see to whatever serious problems they had, just as soon as they figured out what to with the Bangladeshi? Why not? They follow similar trades and are both sedentary.

Academics and social workers are grouping Gypsies and ITs together using similarly absurd categorizations. Why? It's not the Gypsies and ITs that have very much in common; it's the academics and social workers that specialize in each group who are more alike basically than peas in a pod, and those in the field who specialize in Gypsies overwhelmingly outnumber their opposite numbers in IT territory. I presume that this is why most calls for social, legal or political action in the British Isles (including Eire) seem to ignore any telling points that might exclusively advantage ITs, even if they would not disadvantage the Gypsies. It's not the Gypsies themselves who would resent such "pushiness" so much as it would be their prominent (mostly gadje) proponents among the academic and bureaucratic community whose stock in trade are Gypsies.

You state that a people's right to respect should not hinge on any of the arguments I cite, which are essentially those of origin. I brought up the question of origin mainly as a point of law, establishing the right of prior access as grounds for some sort of easement. As I see it (admittedly from a distance) the ITs' right to a full (Irish) governmental respect of their traditions, in the form of laws, allowing them extraordinary rights perhaps to the inconvenience, even detriment or distaste, of their "buffer" neighbors, must be won on a social, political and legal basis, in no particular hierarchy of procession. "Respect" itself, I believe, has no concrete existence; it is merely a report card for the inner child, a validation of achievement, hopefully genuine achievement. No one or no people has any inherent right to respect (that can be enforced, anyway). The only intrinsic right people have, in my megalomaniacal opinion, is the right to respect or disrespect whomever they damn well please, for whatever reasons they deem significant. What they do, even what they may say, might be restricted by law, but not what they think. The only fundamental equation of "respect" is "You've got to give it to get it." Yes, I got that line (or something very close to it) from "The Fixer," by Malamud.

With respect to your point that no one questions that Americans are "Americans" and Australians are "Australian" regardless of origin, I am afraid that you are overlooking the Native Americans and Aborigines who are obviously more so and directly comparable to the case of the ITs in Eire, in my opinion. We may look like average Caucasoid people (mostly) but countless generations have produced hereditary instincts quite different from the average American or Irishman, sort of a roaming, instead of homing, pigeon.

From the far outside, from my point of view, too many ITs in Eire appear to me to be like disenfranchised nomads (like unhorsed Cheyenne Indians, which is probably very politically incorrect to say) confined to ghastly urban and suburban ghettos/reservations, many depending on public charity (and isn't that an oxymoron), some existing barely above a subsistence level. I must stress to you that I don't think less of my cousins for this state of affairs and I am sure there must be a number of them who are coping quite well, some who are even prosperous. But we've been bred to require freedom and when there is insufficient freedom to roam, to work successfully for ourselves, to be able to validate our traditional relationships, many of us become desperate creatures indeed. It's [similar efforts to "fix" the Travellers are] also [starting to occur] here in the USA, despite the several million square miles available, to my own extended family. ["To fix" is an interesting phrase to use in this context. Its three principal interpretations are: to repair flaws, to confine to a certain stationary position, to emasculate; chilling associations, those.]

RE: my wish for "a rebirth of IT culture in a viable form that is acceptable to the Irish in general"; I don't think there's a need to defend that statement. What a wonderful outcome that would be, taken on its own terms without inferences. But Irish laws and attitudes, both "buffers'" and Travellers' attitudes, will have to change a great deal, I think, for this to come about and even then I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime. By "viable" I don't mean some sort of idyllic return for all ITs to living in wagons, breeding horses, cooking on campfires, tinning pails and pots (the whole romantic image of yesteryear). But just consider "Shelta" as an indicator: we in the USA, as well the ITs in Eire, have lost at least 80%, probably 90+% of the old IT Cant, in only four to five generations. Yet most Travellers and scholars alike would agree that the language is the most significant cultural marker that identifies ITs to each other (lineage being the significant non-cultural marker). Is that "viable?"

To be continued.

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