On the road to their own self-definition

Jane Helleiner's academic examination of the place of the Traveller in Irish society opens with an account of her first night living in a Traveller camp in Galway city.

She was, she writes, "feeling relaxed and optimistic about the prospects for my research". The sense of well-being was broken, however, by an item on that night's news about a violent attack on a Traveller camp in Galway city. It was not the same camp, but she knew from her reading of existing literature that such attacks "represented the more extreme end of a continuum of exclusionary action as affecting Travellers in the city, region and Ireland as a whole".

Helleiner spent nine months of 1986 on the Traveller camp. Living in a trailer with her husband, the doctoral student - from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto - conducted ethnographic research and participant-observation, and followed this up with four trips back to Ireland between 1994 and 1999 for archival research.

Her opening experience is followed on by an analysis of the origins of the Traveller population in Ireland and of the peculiarly Irish anti-Traveller racism.

She immediately challenges the explanation, prevalent since the 1960s, that Travellers were of colonial origin, descendants of small landowners who were victims of Cromwell's "to hell or Connacht" policy, or those who were dispossessed during the Famine. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Judith Okely, she locates the beginning of a mobile Irish population in pre-Conquest times, when this country's economy was based on pastoralism rather than agriculture and had a decentralised political system. This mobility was noted by 12th-century writers, she says, and used in the 16th century as justification for the colonial enterprise.

The harsh treatment to which this mobile population was subjected, first by the British and then by an increasingly urbanised /bourgeois rural Irish population, she argues, has been rooted in the disinclination by these dominant groups to accommodate the tinker/gypsy/ Traveller culture.

She makes a convincing and fascinating case for a subtle if obvious distinction between the prevailing sense of aesthetic in tolerance of "otherness" and the actual propertied, self-interested intolerance of a way of life incompatible with the "settled" way of doing things.

The current situation of the Traveller is rooted less in a disapproval or fear of Travellers, but rather more in a stubborn determination not to accommodate them.

The discourse on Travellers has always been, and largely remains, a hostile one. The Travellers' salvation lies, so this discourse tells us, in their conforming to the "settled" way of life.

Faced with such a hostile discourse on their identity, Travellers themselves have struggled to forge their own positive self-definition, she says.

In my experience of talking with Travellers, I have often heard older Travellers speak of their culture being "taken from" them, and younger Travellers say that at times they wish they weren't Travellers, that life in a "settled" society would be easier.

By, inevitably, entering into this discourse as unequal partners, argues Hellenier, Travellers themselves have allowed/been forced to allow their own struggles around class, gender and the role of children to be obscured.

Their cultural and political evolution has been thwarted.

Helleiner's book includes chapters examining Traveller economy, class structures, women, children, accommodation, mobility and kinship. "The result may be that processes( of discourse and dialogue) that paradoxically reproduce attributes of naturalised difference and inferiority have become sources of oppressive constraint rather than liberation", she says.

That 1986 report concluded: " The circumstances of the Irish Travelling people are intolerable. No decent or humane society once made aware of such circumstances could permit them to exist."

Kitty Holland is an Irish Times journalist who has written extensively on the situation of Travellers in Ireland.