Sir, - It has become commonplace among some people to regard Travellers as an ethnic minority in Ireland. While no doubt the people who promulgate this view do so from the best of motives, it is arguable that their efforts will have precisely the opposite results to those intended. For their view of ethnicity is derived from an historical fallacy that has had disastrous consequences elsewhere, and therefore must be a cause of some concern here.
The starting point of this fallacy was the perfectly reasonable idea that the treatment of Travellers in Ireland was analogous to the racist treatment of Africans under colonialism. But this quickly changed. From a position of seeing it as analogous, it was now asserted that the treatment of Travellers was no longer analogous to racism, it was racism. In order to sustain this view, it became necessary for Travellers to become a race, a people with an independent ethnic identity.
Here a comparison with Africa may be useful. Ethnic identity in Africa, sometimes knows as tribalism, was not the continuum of some primordial past as many Europeans assumed; it was an invention of the colonialists themselves, designed to facilitate administration. Europeans believed Africans lived in tribes; Africans invented tribes to belong to. Similarly, well-meaning and socially concerned people believed travellers were an ethnic group; Travellers have become an ethnic group to prove them right.
The effects in Africa have been disastrous. Going from a time when identity was fluid and multiple, we have arrived at a state of ever intensifying ethnic exclusivity, to the extent that a great deal of African politics is now predicated on it. Too often, the results are horrific.
Similarly, by concretising a fluid status, those people arguing for a Traveller ethnos have created circumstances where the available options have been narrowed rather than widened. Official documents will - or, it will be argued, should for monitoring purposes - define the ethnic identity of their subject. Identities will have become fixed and, given that this is a result of a process of modernisation, may well be intensified over the generations. A new grouping will have attained an official status; escaping that denomination, if that is what somebody wishes to do, will no longer be an option.
We live in pleasant, liberal times; only a fool believes we will do so for all time. And if things change, a ghetto is not the place to be, as refugees here know only too well, no matter how jolly its original architects intended it should be. Perhaps, if instead of erecting further ideologically constructed barriers, we thought in terms of an increasing commonality, we might achieve better results. - Yours, etc.,
Eoin Dillon, Mount Brown, Dublin 8.