I'm a traveller- AMA

[Pinkyyy]

I was actually asked on another post to start this thread, I've been debating the idea for a while but usually decide not to because I've seen threads like this turn sour before. Hopefully I can avoid that and actually provide information and educate people on a way of life they may well know very little about.

I invite you to ask any questions you may have, and I will do my best to answer them all honestly. I ask that you don't bother to comment if you're going to bombard me with racism and ignorance. If you'd like to question a common stereotype, by all means go ahead but I will not respond to those who are simply here to be hateful. I also hope you'll respect that I don't like to share too much of my personal details on here, so I'm aiming more to speak about travellers as a a whole and not so much about me personally.

So.... AMA

I think in England there is a common assumption that all travellers are Irish travellers, and people are often very surprised to learn that this is not the case

I should say first that I've had virtually no contact with Travellers of any ethnicity since living in England, but it is my impression from the media that Irish Travellers in England attract extra prejudice from lingering general anti-Irishness towards Irish people in general. These days explicitly calling Irish people backward, uncivilised, dirty, ignorant and violent etc etc is not socially acceptable (although I've noticed it around a bit more because of the idea that Ireland is 'holding up Brexit' ), but it's still apparently OK to say this of Irish Travellers.

And some people here don't fully understand the difference between Irish people and Irish Travellers I mean, that Travellers are a distinct ethnic group. The way the media has described the badly-behaved family who hit the news because of their littering and pilfering on holiday in New Zealand initially highlighted the fact that they were thought to be Irish, which was gleefully shouted in every tabloid headline, then that they were 'Irish Travellers', then (apparently I haven't kept up) that they were settled Liverpudlians.

I do feel that attitudes towards Travellers show elements of lingering anti-Irishness.

Can I ask those of you on the thread in Ireland/of Irish origin what the prevailing attitudes are in Ireland towards Travellers, settled or not?

I think it's very interesting that there's a joint lobby for Travellers and Roma: in the UK, these are, by and large, treated as completely separate and distinct, and advocacy groups deal with one or the other, unless focused more on a particular neighbourhood where both coexist.

I used to live in an area with a very high concentration of Roma, and there were issues common to those that sometimes happen on temporary sites in the UK: open air defecation, rubbish of all kinds being left indiscriminately, and anti-social behaviour (by British standards). All of these things stemmed from fundamental cultural differences though - between public and private space, attitudes to hygiene (toilets in houses =dirty vs pooing in the ginnel = dirty), gender roles etc There is now a Roma outreach worker in the neighbourhood, which, unfortunately, has experienced increasing tensions between various groups of residents, and she has said that the biggest barrier for the Roma is often lack of English skills to enable them to access services.

It's interesting to me that all the "gypsy" groups, though different in origin, language and customs, struggle for widespread acceptance in the community. I assume it has its historic roots in the travelling lifestyle seen as being subversive in some way, from a state perspective, leading to suspicion and isolation, and thus communities growing and developing in parallel but with little overlap. A bit, in a few ways, I suppose, like the Jewish experience in Europe.

Thanks for this thread all and especiallyPinky I've found it fascinating and informative.
Well conducted too so it's pleasant to read.

Now the all important question.... can you please tell me about the traditional traveller dish that is made from suet and bacon, shaped like an arctic roll?

I'm NI & in a town very split in many ways, including geographically by religion. In my town in general I would say that the Protestant side would be more wary of travellers, but the Catholic side less so -probably as they have more experience from schools & churches with the Irish travellers. A fair number are settled locally.

Total generalisation & there's no trouble per se with travellers from Catholic or Protestant,, however the large number of recent Roma arrivals has caused great unrest in the town.

Thanks so much, Josepheen and Buck- very interesting to read.

Iirc Irish travellers and Romanies are distinctly different ethnic groups. Is this believed in the community op?

We have a traveller (or gypsy I really have no idea) problem where I live. There is a permanent site which looks quite smart but they too their old sofas over the wall into the National trust property next door despite bordering the actual tip. Then there are about 6 areas of land around the city where the council has to get court orders every couple of months to clear after they have been severely damaged. One is a playing field they cover in horse shit after they have used bolt cutters to get the gate open. What do you suggest to stop this?

Have you read the book Gypsy Boy? What did you think,

Pinkyyy I'm from t'North of England and round my way it's frowned on to ask people how much things cost, particularly things like jewellery and personal items. It's thought to be 'common' I suppose, though we're all working class.

There is even a saying "He knows the price of everything and the value of nowt".

I really fancy a bacon clanger after reading this thread. I googled it. I remember my mum making a suet pudding with bacon and onion and I made it myself once but that was years ago. Yumm!

What has surprised me is learning that gypsies tend not to eat healthily. We all have the odd takeaway and treat but most of us cook decent meals with an assortment of veg, for some reason I'd imagined travellers to do the same - maybe even more so with traditional home cooked meals. Grandma's magic soup or stew type stuff. You live and learn.

The other thing that surprised me was the reluctance of travellers to breast feed, even for a short while. Pinkyy said it was because they would have to do it in private but surely no-one would be shy to breast feed in the company of their own family or husband.

Yet all travellers I've seen look well, have nice teeth, lovely hair and must get plenty of exercise.

I don't get the reason for leaving excrement behind, there is just no need even if you don't like using a toilet indoors. You could dig a hole or something like that and bury it which is what people do on outward bound courses. They take a little trowel out with them.

This is a very interesting thread and Pinkyy is great. I've learned so much and been prompted to do more research.

@NottonightJosepheen there is a sort of sense of cohesion, but whilst understanding that we are in many ways, really quite different. I think so many people are completely unaware of there being more than one type of traveller, and even somehow making this one piece if information more well-known would do an awful lot to combat the stereotypes, in my opinion.

@RomanyRoots absolutely right, Irish travellers are usually Catholics and take it quite seriously, regularly attending church

@Parthenope what an interesting observation, is never noticed this before. Of course all of those names are absolutely horrible, pointed towards anyone, but I'd never realised there was a general"anti-irishness' among non travellers

@TheQueef you are very welcome, I'm glad it has come across that way! There are many different names for it, one being bacon clanger as @coconutty said, and it is essentially a rolled up bacon pudding, tied in a muslin cloth and boiled. I actually can't stand it

@buckeejit I've never even thought about the perception on romanies in Ireland before Thai thread, it's amazing that our say it's pretty much the same as over here but with the roles reversed

@Queenofthedrivensnow as far as I know, the ethnic background is different, though we don't really think about it. It's sad that your locals are behaving in that way, especially given the resources around them. Hopefully after enough fines etc, they will stop this behaviour. I haven't read that book, would you recommend it?

@Weezol perhaps it is a class thing then, or maybe even a young people thing as they're much more open in my opinion. That's a really good saying!

@jessstan2 I'm glad you like them, I'm not a fan of most of the traditional 'gypsy food', I find a lot of it to be quite bland really.
Our diet in general really is terrible. I remember as a child, the other children would be excited about going to McDonald's later as a treat, and I always wondered how they could get so excited about something I probably had twice a week.
With breast feeding, I'm sure that most would be comfortable in front of their husbands, but it wouldn't extend much further than that.
Appearance is important to a lot of travellers (definitely not all though) and a lot of time can be spent on looking nice, dont be fooled lol
The excrement issue is a real mystery to me, it seems avoidable and disgusting.

I'm glad you've found it interesting, I certainly have too and will also be doing some research as a result of it!

Hopefully I didn't miss anyone out! Please let know if I have

Earlier in the thread, I mentioned a pattern of marriage amongst the large group of settled travellers, mostly living on a site but with some living in related sites at a little distance.

It seemed - from the pattern of siblings and half-siblings amongst our pupils - that a very small number of mostly older men within the group married (or at least had children with) a series of younger and younger women within the same community. Within this 'extended family of half siblings', older half-siblings usually looked after the younger ones from different mothers, and also the younger children tended to have 'no fixed trailer' where they slept, but would stay with one of a number of 'aunties'.

There were also more 'typical' patterns of marriage between other men and women, often living in the satellite sites or on their own land, marriages which produced many children over a longer period.

Would you say this was typical of some communities of Travellers (I think Welsh in origin, if it helps), or is it very unusual?

I was in a hospital out patient waiting room some years ago, Oral Surgery department, and two ladies came in with some children, one boy was in a wheelchair - not disabled, he'd had an accident - another boy and a girl with gorgeous long hair. The two women were very alike, sisters, with beautiful black hair, wearing very pretty summer dresses. The injured boy was one of their children. Then Dad turned up, straight from a building site wearing shorts, T-shirt and 'rigger's' boots with sand on them. They were Irish travellers and spoke to each other partly ordinary English with an Irish accent and some words which I couldn't understand.

The little boy was checked over by the oral surgeon, he'd had his jaw X-rayed and he was OK.

I've never forgotten how unbelievably beautiful they all looked! Glowing with health and the women and girl so very well dressed and groomed. Dad looked good too but he was in his work clothes. I remember at the time thinking, "Why do people have such a prejudice against gypsies? This is such a lovely family", but I don't know any personally & just encountering a nice looking family as I did is hardly experience.

I live on a long wide road which stretches from one town to another and sometimes young lads race down there with horse and cart. At the bottom is a newsagent/sweet shop and they often stop there to buy a drink, I've talked to the horses (I like horses).

Well I know I'm waffling on about nothing.

Thank you so much for this very informative thread, Pinkyyy. You've surprised me about the diet but I don't think a McDonalds twice a week is too bad quite honestly, as long as people have decent meals in the evening or whenever they all get together. I didn't know the bacon and onion suet pud was a typical gypsy meal, as I said my mum made it once in a blue moon and I made it once. It was lovely but obviously very unhealthy :-). However a little of what you fancy does you good occasionally.

@cantkeepawayforever that is a completely new thing to me, so could well be something that's widely done in Wales. It sounds very strange to me and no doubt is a bit unstable for the younger children who have no fixed place to call home, or any consistent parent figure. Often in my community when a marriage breaks down, the men may move on and have children with another woman, but the woman usually won't have any more.

@jessstan2 that sounds to me like a typical traveller family, which I'm sure you'll agree is so far away from what people's idea in their mind of a traveller family is. It's funny you should mention hospitals, because in our community if someone is in hospital, they get lots of visitors (much to the annoyance of the hospital employees sometimes) and the family of the person will stay there all night and not go home.
I love to hear people's stories so waffle away!
What's funny is that a the bacon suet pudding would actually be on the more healthy scale for us as it's not fried! Travellers have a tendency to eat a lot of fried food.

I'm so pleased that this thread has been such a good way for all of us to learn things and I'm really grateful to everyone who's taken part in this discussion.

I'm probably more out of date than Josepheen about current attitudes to travellers in Ireland, as I've lived in England for some years, but I'd broadly agree with her there seems to me to be more of a public profile of Traveller advocacy organisations like Pavee Point and others in Ireland, compared to England, and a more general sense of Travellers as a minority group. Things have moved on from when I was at primary school in the 1970s when Traveller girls were educated separately in a prefab out the back before being intregrated into classrooms I grew up close to a halting site so there were always Travellers at my school.

And there's far more research into Traveller health, MH etc -- like the suicide rates and life expectancy stats from the big study I linked to earlier.

And a few vocal and articulate Traveller voices in the public domain I know less about the sports side of things, but am thinking of someone like Michael Collins, a Traveller actor who was in some high-profile Irish TV and Traveller-made films like Pavee Lackeen. Or the character of Blackie Connors, a Traveller on a long-running and popular Irish rural soap I don't know whether the actor who played him was a Traveller or not, but I think the role was influential in having people faced with the idea of Travellers as normal members of a rural community, and the ugly fact of anti-Traveller discrimination.

Having said that, in the recent presidental elections, one candidate made some unpleasant remarks about Travellers not being a minority, and there's still discrimination, and the facts in the study -- poorer life expectancy, higher child mortality, high suicide rates, very high rate of deaths among Traveller men in RTAs.

Often in my community when a marriage breaks down, the men may move on and have children with another woman

That may well have been what was happening, primarily. Would the man marry the second woman, or would that tend not to be the case?

(The 'being looked after by the older girls within the community' may simply be what you described earlier - that once girls have left school, they are prepared for life as a Traveller woman, which will involve looking after trailer and family - how better to learn than with the younger children of the site? It may also be that the 'more vulnerable children' within that close-knit community were perhaps being 'looked after' in the best way the community knew how - by care (even if not consistent day to day) within a group of related families)

Dr Sindy Joyce was the first traveller in Ireland to graduate with a PhD last week - link here

@Pinkyyy hi and thanks for answering. The gypsy boy book is a memoir of child abuse I gave it away when I read it. Couldn't have it in the house. Abuse prevalent in all communities - no judgement to be made there and in the book the community deals with the abuser so no suggestion it was tolerated. The author is gay and this was a massive issue though.

Really interesting thread.

Do Romany gypsies tend to have a particular religion?

Could you tell us about any birth/death traditions?

@cantkeepawayforever I think perhaps it could be, usually they will just 'run off' with the second woman which is basically our term for eloping

@Coconutty yes I completely agree, MNers would go mad at the amount of visitors we get in the first few weeks and even days

@Queenofthedrivensnow you are more than welcome. I tend to get very worked up about things so that would probably be a bit too upsetting a book for me. Though I'm sure it is a sign of the harsh reality many young people live through

@Pinkyponkcustard thank you! Vast majority are Catholic, though in recent years some are becoming born again Christians. Im not sure I can think of any birth traditions, but there are many when it comes to deaths. The most interesting to non-travellers may be the tradition of 'sitting up'. This is when people (mainly the men) will gather together and stay up all night, the night before the funeral, this is seen as a very big sign of respect to the deceased

The sitting up custom is interesting, my in-laws are Irish catholic and they did the same thing when the grandma died who was the matriarch of the family.
It’s nice to know she was surrounded by her family.