A CEREMONY marking the achievements of members of the Traveller community in the areas of education, enterprise and employment, youth work, music and culture will take place at Dublin Civic Offices tomorrow. Awards will be granted on the basis of the passion shown in promoting the positives of Traveller identity and, critically, nominations have come from within the community. Events on Sunday will mark the beginning of Traveller Pride Week.
These are important confidence-building measures in a community that has experienced long-term discrimination, rejection and social ostracism. The statistics of economic and social deprivation speak for themselves: Travellers have an infant mortality rate more than three times the national average; a grossly inferior life expectancy; six times the average rate of suicide and five times as many Travellers as others leave school before the age of 15. Some of these outcomes do not flow from deliberate discrimination but reflect a Traveller culture that is male dominated, inflexible and isolated.
In her “Travellers Today” series, Rosita Boland was told by one women: “there is not much left of Traveller culture. . . the community has split up. . . the wagons, the horses and the campfires have gone”. Perhaps, as she suggested, the campfire, the wagons and the slow pace of horse travel were at the heart of Travellers’ life. But their cultural values, patriarchal discipline, centrality of family and celebration of key life-changing events live on. So too does the social gulf and lack of interaction that separates them from the settled community.
Thirty-five years ago, the Economic and Social Research Institute reported: “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”. It took another 20 years before legislation placed an obligation on elected representatives and local authorities to respond to these housing needs. But local prejudice brought long delays in drafting schemes for housing and halting sites. Similarly, anti-discriminatory legislation designed to vindicate their rights as citizens was only partially effective. But much has changed. A 2008 census indicated a doubling in population. The number of families on the roadside has fallen dramatically and a majority now live in houses. Conditions at many halting sites remain grim, however, and local authorities have not met their statutory requirements.
The “Travellers Today” series reflected an isolated community under stress where traditional values and male dominance are being eroded. Education may be the springboard to a new form of empowerment, but it has not been accepted as such by a culture whose patriarchs are sometimes violent and often illiterate. Instead, women are taking advantage of education and are increasingly representing their communities. Such internal tensions do not, however, release the settled community from a need to accept diversity or from its responsibility to address Traveller requirements in relation to housing, education, health and employment.