Travellers jailed for attacking Gardai

LoganRice

What a tragic story that is

El_Duderino 09

Lads do you know what I think is most irritating about the Travellers? It's how much we have in common with them.

I live in the UK and some people used to equate Irish with Travellers. I moved over for Uni and my mates made scrap-metal jokes at me for a week before I realised they were Traveller jokes. There was no point explaining to them that I was in higher education which made the likelihood of me being a Traveller, vanishingly small.

My OH is a professional and someone told her 'her lot' had set up camp outside the town.

This got me thinking of all the ways in which we are different and I settled on the main points highlighted in this thread; theft, antisocial behaviour, failure to adhere to social norms. However the real kicker came when I realised that we have much more in common than I would like to believe.

Anyone familiar with English weddings/funerals/christenings will know that even funerals are invite only and people meet for the service and burial and go home. Weddings usually finish at a reasonable hour like 10-12. We look at traveller weddings and laugh at how OTT they are. They go further than us, they are at 11/10 and we're at about a 9/10 for ridiculousness.

The theft side of it was put in context for me when a friend of mine emigrated to Germany and said they have an expression in Munich along the lines of 'you never needed a lock for your bike until the Irish arrived' which refers to the last wave of Irish emigration in the 80's.

We laugh at them for their ostentatious displays of wealth in cars, chaleys, garish clothes. Now look back at the years when the whole of Europe had money in the early 2000s. What did the settled people of Ireland spend money on? BMWs and garish McMansions. Look at a country with a bit of class like Germany and Holland, they enjoyed themselves but, they saved some money.

We look down on travellers because they genuinely are a step below us in almost any societal scale you can mention. They contribute very little to art, culture, political life, ideas for advancing Ireland in the world, Academic life, scientific advancement. Christ their rates of literacy are genuinely a joke in the 21st century. This research by the Royal College of Surgeons Estimates that 80% of adult Travellers can't read.

We look down on them because they are one step down the ladder from us. The more reserved and matured nations look down on both of us and don't see it as worth their while telling us apart because we are so similar. That's what pisses me off the most about the Travellers.

mikom

El_Duderino 09 wrote: »

The more reserved and matured nations look down on both of us

They sound really mature..........

El_Duderino 09

mikom wrote: »

They sound really mature..........

I don't understand