Writing about travellers is a fast way, in the Irish media, to land yourself in trouble. In 2012, John Joe Nevin, an Irish Olympic hero and member of the traveller community, was left with two broken legs after a vicious assault which arose from a feud in his extended family. The Irish Daily Mail columnist at the time, Brenda Power, wrote a piece on foot of that incident which was highly critical of the culture in the travelling community. Traveller men, she argued, tend to be lazy, violent, drunken, and misogynistic while the travelling community “milks the state for all that it is worth”.
“The media is terrified of appearing critical of ‘Traveller culture’, of which feuding is the principle expression these days”, she said.
For those and other statements, Ms Power found herself at the centre of a storm. The Director of Public Prosecutions opened a file into the article, before deciding that Ms. Power would not in fact be charged with incitement to hatred. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties – in theory those charged with defending our right to free speech – reacted to the news that Power would not face criminal charges with something approaching horror, arguing that her article proved the need for strengthened hate speech laws.
The Press Council, meanwhile, found Power guilty of breaching the guidelines against incitement, a decision that traveller NGOs cheered while still lamenting the fact that she had not been arraigned on criminal charges.
A few years later, this writer was invited to take part in a television programme on what was then still called TV3, entitled “eating with the enemy”. The basic idea was that two people who fundamentally disagreed would sit down and have a dinner and see if they could behave like civilised people. We were not told, in advance, with whom we would be dining. I walked into the dinner to find myself sitting down with the co-director of Pavee Point, the state-funded NGO for travellers, one Martin Collins. The idea, as best I could tell, was to present me as the child of privilege who would be educated by Collins over dinner and helped to overcome whatever anti-traveller prejudices I held. This struck me as strange at the time, since I had never written, or really even commented in public about travellers or their culture, other than to argue once or twice on the radio that recognising travellers as a distinct ethnic group was absurd – an argument that has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of their culture. A culture which, it must be said, includes some things worth praise and admiration – travellers, as my colleague Niamh points out, have produced a disproportionate number of wonderful traditional musicians, and have preserved their own language and dialect through decades much better than Irish people have preserved their own.
But in the aftermath of the conviction for the murder of Thomas Dooley of several members of Dooley’s own family it is, I think, worth revisiting Brenda Power’s broad thesis. Because while her language may well have been needlessly harsh in places, it seems to me that in large part, Power was right.
The state’s case in the Dooley trial – accepted by the Jury beyond a reasonable doubt – was that the murder was an “honour killing” sparked by the refusal of the dead man’s daughter to marry the son of one of his killers. The idea that the daughter herself would have made this decision does not appear to have come into the mind of the murderers: She was her father’s property, and her refusal to marry was his crime. That this is a medieval way of seeing the world is, I think, reasonably self-evident.
It is worth at this point mentioning some of the disadvantages that travellers face in Irish society – disadvantages often attributed to the rest of us, and not traveller culture itself. 28% of travellers leave school before the age of 13, as opposed to only 1% of the rest of the population. According to the 2011 census, only 8% complete a leaving cert, compared to 73% of non-travellers. In England and Wales, 57% of Irish Travellers report having no qualification whatsoever, as opposed to 18% for the wider population.
In terms of law and order, travellers make up 0.7% of the Irish population, but 10% of its prison population. For women, this figure increases still: 15% of those in women’s prisons are travellers. In 2021, the Oireachtas was told that a quarter of women in one prison alone were travellers.
There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, one could adopt the high-status opinion that is in vogue in liberal society – that this is in essence the fault of everybody else, and that it is discrimination and disadvantage that makes travellers leave school and end up in prison in disproportionate numbers. This is in essence the official position of the state and most of polite society.
Or on the other hand, one could adopt the view that Brenda Power nearly found herself being prosecuted for: That within traveller culture, there is a deep resistance to assimilation with the rest of society and that – for want of a better or less simple term – backwardness is a point of pride.
I write this not to kick at a community that does, of course, face discrimination. I write it because it is observably true. A culture in which arranged cousin marriages are commonplace, family feuds erupting into violence is commonplace, and in which education is repeatedly disrupted by the impulse to travel is simply not well equipped for the modern world and is likely to result in a community that disproportionately fills our prisons. There isn’t a whole lot the rest of us can do about it.
What’s more, attempts by the state to preserve and defend that way of life are self-evidently wrong-headed. When your culture has elements within it that are evidently harmful and self-destructive, it is not the duty of the state to try and mitigate that. A child who moves from school to school, never staying more in one place than a year or two, is self-evidently at a disadvantage compared to a settled child. More funding for traveller NGOs is not going to eliminate that disadvantage, which arises directly from the traveller way of life.
Nor is there a single thing that the state can do to prevent cases like the Dooley case. The state – or indeed the rest of society – can hardly persuade travelling people that arranged marriages between cousins are in the first instance a bad idea and in the second instance not worth feuding over. That is a realisation that travellers will have to reach themselves.
In the meantime, by constantly throwing money at the preservation of traveller culture, all we are doing is papering over the cracks – nay, the yawning gulf – between many aspects of that culture and the prerequisites for life in the modern world.
That chasm between travellers and the rest of us – with the attendant consequences it has for too many people in their community – is their choice. Not ours.