IRISH TRAVELLERS

New Year -  time  for looking both backward  forward, wondering if what happened last year will make the coming year better or worse. 

For instance, in  the Irish presidential election  last year one of the contestants seemed to have little chance of election, he had only a few points in the opinion polls, but from that  humble beginning he ended up getting  nearly 25 percent of the votes cast . So what happened to bring him such  increased popularity? During his campaign he made remarks about Irish Travelling People that seemed likely to reduce his chances but they  had the opposite effect. He was reported to have said, "Travellers are basically people  camping on other people's land" and that they did not pay their share of taxes.  

For many people these remarks were unwelcome and damaging -  in recent years there have been significant  efforts to assert the dignity of  Travelling People as an Irish ethnic minority, equal citizens entitled to all the courtesies that deserves.  Support for this has been  increasing but there is  opposition and resentment as well. Mr Casey's sudden rise to nearly  25%  showed that an unexpectedly large  number of people in Ireland  were serious enough , and numerous enough, to challenge the slowly emerging  favourable change  in public opinion about our Travelling People .  This comes at a time when people  in other European countries  are showing increasing anxiety and anger about  migrants coming in from other countries ;  Ireland has in a sense  migrants within -  moving from place to place in Ireland to live according to their own traditions in their own country. In Ireland  they are part of the nation , not "foreigners" ,  so any European trend against "foreigners" does not  apply.   

One of our artists, Liam Andrews , was fascinated by the Irish Travelling People whom he recognised as keepers of an Irish and international cultural tradition. The relationship between "settled" people and the Travellers in Ireland though has a lot of problems that need  sensitivity and imagination similar to his, and social resources as well.

Problems like this increase as people become more and more organised into, and around,  land ownership, so what happens when people whose culture arises  not  from land ownership but from land use and  when the services they provide to others require that they move from place to place to provide them? It is not an Irish but an international historical situation that has not been solved because we allowed land ownership to win over land as a shared inheritance for our peoples.

"Reservations"  caused so much hurt in America and Australia that we  think , How could they treat people that way?  Then we realise nervously how in Ireland we have reservations too , small reservations, asking people who are essentially Travellers to become "settled " like the rest of us.  Maybe we don't realise how some social - and economic - changes we consider "natural to progress" have been so hurtful  for some of us.

The Casey incident  may suggest that a lot of us in Ireland are willing to base our politics on  selective  rather than shared citizenship. We Old Folk saw such ideas swell up and develop in Europe in our day. Minorities were converted into enemies in their own countries. 

We found out the hard way how bad that was. In Germany, Ireland.......... or anywhere else.  So  in 2019 will we see land ownership and  enlightened land sharing moving  together in Ireland ? It could prove difficult in the present political climate in Europe but Ireland could perhaps lead the way in an  imaginative, creative  Irish solution to an Irish - and international - problem.  A new political party to  restrict the rights and dignity of Irish Traveller citizens is, however, a sad possibility.