"THESE Travellers ... insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble so long as it holds together by a single thread . . . The worst quarters of any town are inhabited by Travellers. Whenever an area is distinguished by especial filth and especial ruinousness, [one] may safely count upon meeting chiefly traveller faces which one recognises at first glance as different . . . and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true traveller never loses
The Traveller deposits all garbage and filth before his front door... and accumulates the pools and the dirtheaps which disfigure working people's estates and poison the air ... The filth and comfortlessness that prevail are impossible to describe...
"The Traveller is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his bed. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach - chairs, doorposts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney.
"Drink is the only thing which makes the Traveller's life worth having ... so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The facile character of the Traveller, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all human enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and his poverty all favour drunkenness ... when he gets money he gets rid of it down his throat."
Emigrants' Plight
Had Mary Ellen Synon written those words, she would have been subject to yet further calumny; and had I defended her right to say those words, never mind whether or not I agreed with them, likewise for me. She did not write them. They were written by somebody whom many of the self appointed spokes(wo)men for the Travellers probably admire Friedrich Engels; but he was writing not about Travellers but ordinary Irish emigrants to England. I merely substituted "Traveller" for "Irish".
Engels did not make those observations in order to vilify or generate hostility against the average Irish emigrant. Quite the reverse. He was writing for a German audience and was deeply moved by the appalling plight of the Irish in English towns; the quote above, about drink, concludes. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which almost of necessity he becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, his savagery?"
We are back to the issue of Travellers again because there is no getting away from it, and we must deal with it without public effusions of meaningless piety; and even more important, without tolerating the voices of hatred. We heard the voice of hatred last week from Waterford; had such sentiments been issued about Jews, we know the speaker would have been ejected from the chamber. They were not and he was not; the only useful thing that gentleman has to teach us is that there are others with such disgusting and intolerable opinions.
A Life Abominated
In her controversial article in the Sunday Independent Mary Ellen Synon clearly abominated Traveller life. What is wrong with that? Engels clearly abominated the life of the Irish working class emigrant in England. But for the Irish individuals concerned, he felt every sympathy, just as she felt admiration for those able to escape the dreadfulness of the circumstances of so many Travellers' lives. As well she might, for who truly finds the prospect of life as a Traveller appetising? She certainly did not urge discrimination or violence against travellers - she merely spoke of her thorough dislike for the circumstances in which they live. That is her right; as Travellers may disdain and deplore her way of life too, and mine.
There is no more difficult issue in Irish life than this one. I have written before about the monstrous discrimination which Travellers must face; but the High Moral Grounders have always chosen to ignore that and to concentrate on what I think undesirable about Traveller life. But we know the problem can only be solved by honesty, and not by the kind of putative piety of a letter writer in Dundrum who disassociated himself from membership of a putative group "who live in hope that a Travellers' halting site is not constructed next to their houses." I have land next to my house which conceivably could be turned into a halting site; the pious letter writer lives in a densely built estate where no such site is possible. His virtue is tested, therefore unlikely to be.
Now, I see, the National Union of Journalists has weighed in with instructions not to refer to Travellers as itinerants, knackers, traders or tinkers. So what are we to call them? If they deal in horses, are they not knackers? If they work tin, are they are not tinkers? If they trade, are they not traders? If they are itinerant, are they not itinerants?
Changing Nomenciature
A rose by any other name ... The first response of feelgooders to a problem is to change the language associated with that problem. So tell me: is the position of American blacks improved or altered by the repeated change in the vocabulary we are commanded to employ about them? Nigger gave way to coloured; coloured gave way to negro; negro gave way to black; black gave way to African American - yet how many bigots actually had their minds changed by such nomenclatural switches?
Linguistic dodges don't avoid disdain; they mask it. The term "remedial" was devised to prevent the retarded child from being stigmatised by its peers; now the term is itself stigmatic. We can call the nomadic minority of Ireland whatever we like; it will not alter the nature of the profound problems which they already face and which will almost certainly get worse.
Self appointed Defenders
Those problems will not be diminished by non traveller traveller spokes(wo)men who have a nice line in sanctimoniously accusatory waffle directed at those with whom they disagree. Travellers are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves; they don't need self appointed Political Lady Bountifuls speaking for them.