At 19 Tammy Kiely has been to a disco "about three times in my life." It is not that she is withdrawn, diffident or shy. It is not that she would not like to get out and enjoy Dublin night-life a little more. And it is not as if she and her friends have not tried to get into discos.
But Tammy is a Traveller. And Travellers - the generalisation is generally true - do not get into discos.
"The security guards always have some excuse," she says. "We just want to go to ordinary places in town. One night we tried to get into seven discos. There were about six of us and when we walked up to the doors they asked us for ID. Then if we showed them a passport they said that wasn't good enough, that we needed to have student cards.
"When one of my friends showed them his student card, they said that wasn't enough and that we had to be members. And people were walking straight in past us. It makes you feel very small and in the end you just stop trying."
Born in Tullamore, Co Offaly, she has three brothers and two sisters ranging in age from nine to 21. The family settled in Limerick when she was 10, and moved to a halting site in Lucan, Co Dublin, four years ago.
Having left secondary school after first year, Tammy did several computer courses and is now working as a receptionist at the Citizen Traveller office in Dublin. Her family lives in three mobile homes; one in which the girls sleep, one for the boys and one for her parents, Brigid and John.
"It's a nice site," she says, "because we keep it nice. But there's no heating in the concrete sheds where we shower. There're no tiles and it's all steel. The trailers have electricity, but you can have only one thing on at a time or the fuse will blow."
She says her father, who used to run a tarmacadam business, is now self-employed and starting in landscape gardening, while her mother is a housewife.
The bright-eyed redhead seems at first to shrug off the exclusion she regularly encounters, though when pressed she recounts incident after incident and wonders why she is so often frustrated in her efforts to do the normal teenage things.
She and her friends enjoy the cinema. "But we can't go to the local one, at Liffey Valley. They put us out over Christmas, when we went to see Angela's Ashes, so we can't go there now.
"They said we were laughing and called the police. There were 11 of us, so maybe they felt threatened by us. But we weren't even all sitting together.
"Another time I walked up to a shop in the Liffey Valley centre and a security guard stopped me and said he had me on video camera and told me, `Get out, you red-headed bitch'.
"Like, what's their problem?
"Another time we went up to a shop and the alarm went off. The security guard just came and grabbed our bags off our shoulders, and started rummaging through them, in front of everyone.
It has always been the case, she continues, telling how she used to come home from town crying at the kind of treatment she had received.
"My parents? Oh, they used to go mad, feeling hurt for us."
As for whether it all affects how high Travellers feel they can aim, she says it does. "It would put me off trying to go to college if I thought I was going to have to put up with that all the time."
Although her leaving school was mainly because her family left Limerick where she had been at school, she says she has heard other Traveller teenagers say the slagging gets unbearable from about second year. "They say it's not worth the hassle of going on."
And she does not know how people know she is a Traveller, wondering sometimes if she will ever break free of the stereotype image the "settled" community has of her.
"It's constantly on my mind. You do wonder if it's ever going to change. I know settled people probably just haven't talked to Travellers and they are hearing bad things about us from when they are very young. There are, of course, some Travellers who carry on badly, but there are bad apples in every cart."
She'd like to get to know more settled people, she says, and is hoping to go back to finish secondary school.
"I'd like to get a full-time job as a receptionist in an office in town or somewhere, somewhere not necessarily working in a Traveller organisation."
She says she will always consider herself a Traveller, though sometimes she wishes she was not.
"Sometimes you wish life was easier, to be able to go wherever you want without people looking down at you. But no, I'll always be a Traveller. I think I will always live in a mobile home, too. It's what I know. It's what makes me feel secure."