Challenging `us' to join `them'

This collection of articles - by Travellers but aimed at "us" - introduces itself: "Our challenge to an Intercultural Ireland in the 21st Century". It goes on to open with a poem by one of its compilers, Cathleen McDonagh. Herself a Traveller, she writes in `I Too Have A Dream': "that parents will not have to experience anger and pain of innocence shattered as they try to explain why,/ that young people of both cultures would be able to meet and/socialise freely, that no more would our young be turned from/ the doors and refused entry `you are not welcome here' ".

This book is part of the Traveller community's campaign to realise that dream. Published to coincide with the Citizen Traveller campaign, it is a collection of writings almost all by Travellers, about themselves and their interaction with wider Irish society. Organised into two sections, it deals first with the question "Who Are the Travelling People?" and later poses "Challenges From The Traveller Community".

Traveller culture, misunderstood and often reviled, should not be pigeon-holed, says Michael McDonagh in his essay on "Ethnicity and Culture". In further essays he offers an enormously interesting exploration of the history of Travellers, of the essential role of the extended family to their culture and of how intrinsic the concept of nomadism is to the Traveller identity - even to the "settled" few.

Looking at issues such as accommodation, discrimination, health and education, the writers describe their experiences, and though even at times praising policy, continue to provoke questions. The Housing (Traveller Accommodation) Act 1998 - which obliges local authorities to provide accommodation for Travellers - is largely welcomed by David Joyce. However, he wonders whether local authorities "will continue to defy government policy by creating accommodation programmes at local level that continue to isolate Travellers".

This is a powerful, beautiful and welcome book - an indication that this State's only indigenous ethnic minority is no longer willing to play the victim, but determined to do its bit to challenge "us" to join "them", in attitude at least, in their project to create greater understanding.

On accommodation again, a question is put by one writer - one that is telling more than asking. Why is it that property values supposedly fall if a halting site is built nearby, asks McDonagh. After all, he says, "People don't devalue property, attitudes do".

Kitty Holland is an Irish Times journalist