‘You are never going to be one of us’: Dublin’s Roma face pressure to hide ethnicity

Roma women living in Dublin face relentless racism — exacerbated by being easily identifiable in their traditional clothes of long, colourful skirts and scarves — they say in a radio documentary broadcast on Saturday to mark International Roma Day.

Gabi Muntean, a Roma-community support worker, describes feeling “very bad, hopeless, helpless” after flowers she was selling some years ago were grabbed from her and thrown around the street.

Vanessa Paszkowska, a young Dublin-born woman studying for her Master’s degree in Maynooth University, recalls being told in school by another girl: “’It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you are a gypsy and you are always going to be a gypsy. You are never going to one of us’. I felt heat coming through my body, the anger boiling inside of me but I couldn’t open my mouth and from that point onwards I had to hide my ethnicity to have equal treatment,” she says.

‘Always stealing’

Sylvia Covaci, also born in Ireland, describes going shopping with her mother. “I was dressed like an Irish girl. I was wearing a tracksuit, holding an energy drink. I had my airpods in ... My mum was wearing the traditional clothes ... plain, normal Roma clothes.

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“[The shop assistant] stopped my mom from entering the shop and I asked her [why].” She was told: “‘We stopped letting any Roma come in this shop. Everyone is always stealing from here.’ So, my mum wasn’t able to do her shopping because she is Roma.”

The women’s experiences are recounted in the documentary, A Roma Girl in Dublin, to be broadcast on Newstalk. Ms Muntean, who works with Pavee Point, hoped the documentary would show Roma women’s lives were marked by “multiple layers of discrimination”.

There are an estimated 5,000 Roma living in Ireland — though this is likely to be an undercount — with at least a fifth in consistent poverty. Many face huge challenges proving they are habitually resident here — necessary to access basic entitlements — as well as discrimination in employment, housing and access to justice.

Woven through the programme is an interview with Dmitru Rostas, younger brother of Marioara Rostas (18) who was abducted and murdered in January 2008. She had been in Ireland just weeks and was begging with her brother at the junction of Pearse and Lombard Streets.

Rostas, speaking through an interpreter, says the family lived in a derelict cottage and begged. It took the family three days to be able to report Mariora missing to gardaí due to their lack of English.

The case, says Muntean, underlined in the most tragic way the hate and racism her community faces and then barriers in accessing services. “Mariora is one of us who struggled. Her family was not habitually resident.” Many in her community remain so marginalised and the women so vulnerable, “that could happen another time, like Mariora”, she says.

‘No representation’

The women stress their pride in their Roma identity. Ms Paszkowska says a key moment for her came when watching an online talk when she was in 5th year.

“I still felt very much alone because I saw no representation [of Roma]. But then I stumbled across a Tedtalk of this Roma woman who was giving her experience in education,” she tells the documentary producer, Susan Dennehy.

“And I could relate to that. I saw her perform in her long skirt, and I thought, ‘gosh she looks like me. She looks like my family and she’s out there speaking with her flag behind her’. That was a very powerful moment. [I thought] ‘I want to be like her’. She was a woman from my ethnicity and slowly, slowly I became more comfortable. I started loving who I am.”