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Interesting article about Travellers by a Traveller

BalcombeSt4

https://medium.com/@clxddxgh/dear-settled-people-we-need-to-talk-5e32c0797881

Dear settled people: we need to talk.

I was four years old the first time I remember being discernibly aware that I was different. A girl in my class was having a birthday party, a party that we were all invited to. But when I showed up with my mother I was asked to leave. My friends mother had nothing against us you see- she’d just rather we weren’t there. She “didn’t want any trouble”. I remember that particular incident, not because it was particularly momentous,not because of how particularly ridiculous it was that she thought a four year old girl was interested in causing trouble, but because when we returned home that afternoon I saw my mother cry for the first and only time. Crying isn’t something that we travellers do, it’s a sign of weakness even in children. So to see my mother, an adult, someone who was supposed to be unshakeable, cry over something that hadn’t even really bothered me, frightened me. I didn’t know then what she did- that what had happened wasn’t a singular trivial event but rather a symptom of a larger problem. A problem that 18 years later I still haven’t managed to escape.

...

I loved it taught it was great, articulate & moving.

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jackofalltrades

end of the road wrote: »

the revenue investigate travelers. all the time and on a huge scale.

Do you have a source for the bit highlighted?

buried

It's a definite 'fear of the other' that exists in both communities. The criminal element that exists in the travelling community is basically a refusal on some of their part to learn or remain in education the last good few decades. The internet can make a key difference here for younger Traveller people if it is used in the right way, they probably all have phones, the internet is such a information hub it can make learning more natural and therefore more enjoyable to the next generation and help them get out of this cycle of leaving education at early stages. I think this is happening already. Younger Traveller people seem to be less superstitious as their elders, and man, those people I encountered numerous times were highly superstitious. That boiled down to lack of education also I think. We need to make education more enjoyable and accessible for these younger ones. That will help them see and go down another road that their parents and grandparents didn't. But the settled community also has to help them do it and allow them to advance in it, that means proper integration. It is No good, settled parents throwing hissy fits or taking their own kids out of schools and classes where these people are trying to get involved and learn. That is a huge problem also. It sows the seeds of more and more segregation and therefore more problems down the line.

Biscuitus

I helped clean up a traveller site a few years ago and we found an abandoned dog chained to a washing machine. Put that in a newspaper article and see what happens.

I'll never give a single thought of care for anyone in the travelling community when they're such heartless monsters.

[Deleted User]

Biscuitus wrote: »

I helped clean up a traveller site a few years ago and we found an abandoned dog chained to a washing machine. Put that in a newspaper article and see what happens.

I'll never give a single thought of care for anyone in the travelling community when they're such heartless monsters.

To recap, you will write off an entire community of humans, and never give a care about them, because one of them tied a dog to a washing machine?

But they are heartless?

Eevs98

Deleted User wrote: »

Speaking of odd, Eevs has 12 posts. 100% of them are on this topic. He seems to be checking her out, albeit so badly it's kinda funny. I love the one where he thinks the newspapers have a list of everyone who gets straight As like there is a requirement to publish.

When have I ever said anything about newspapers having straight As? Ive literally never mentioned straight As or newspapers? I made this account because I follow her on twitter and someone linked this thread. I've never used boards before, and I haven't pretended otherwise.

Akrasia

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Actually, the Council of Europe found that the Council's treatment of travellers constituted a breach of human rights. The amount spent on sites is a joke, millions slashed off a meagre budget in recent years, something like 50 sites provided out of the 1,000 it was felt would be needed 20 years ago.

It would help if they didn't keep burning down the houses we build for them

Wibbs

osarusan wrote: »

I have every sympathy for travellers who suffer not because of their own poor behaviour but because of the poor behaviour of other members of the community. There's no doubt that it happen and that it must be awful to be labelled in such a way and with such negativity.

That said, I think that, at advocate level, they are very poorly led, and they make no effort, publicly at least (or privately either, as far as I can see) to address or remedy basically any of the aspects of their own poor behaviour which play a part in the way they are viewed by the rest of the country.

Nail on the head. The major problem with all this talk of integration is it is all coming from one side. Travellers are asking for and getting "rights", but where is the social responsibility coming from their community? Where is the condemnation of the very real social disruptive behaviour coming from their community? Wider society be damned it seems, it's all about what we want. And that will work for a while, but what we're seeing more and more is a real impatience among the rest of Irish society.

buried

Yeah I agree with that too. Just another example where leaders constantly playing and shouting the 'victim' card does absolutely nothing for the community they are supposed to be leading, well not nothing actually, does more damage if anything. All the dark cards need to be laid out on the table from everyone.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Galwayguy35

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Has it ever occurred to you that it would be highly unusual, quite exceptional in fact, for a non-traveller businessperson to hire a male traveller, say as a farm labourer or a barman?

I'd like to know how many of them ever bother even looking for a job, but sure it's always the fault of somebody else.

wally1990

was speaking to a traveller the other day and I ended up mentioning Brexit

she didn't have a bull's notion what I was talking about or what brexit was.

she never heard of it or anything about such.

got me thinking some of them really live in their own little world

maybe it was ignorant of me to assume most people would even heard something called brexit not mind know what it was, but maybe not

Red_Wake

The irony of people crying about public discrimination against traveller is that traveller's depend more on the state and general society more than almost every other section of the society.

Were they expected to provide for themselves in the absence of society as a whole, within a decade, not only would they be extinct, but the only monument to their existence would be the wasteland they'd leave behind.

Rarely has a culture deserved such loathing.

Akrasia

There are hundreds of community development organisations in the country and a significant number of them spend most of their time offering assistance to members of the travelling community in literacy, training, child care programs, after school programs for kids...

All of this work is totally hamstrung by the 'culture' which has no respect for education, no respect for women other than as mothers.

I am as left wing as they come, and I hugely support spending money and energy on early intervention services to break the cycle of poverty and crime, but sometimes there are cultural barriers to integration into civil society.

Travelers can and often do escape from their destiny, and they are worthy of enormous respect, but there are others who are little more than criminal gangs, who raise their children to carry on the family business and hide behind an ethnicity.

Progressives need to reject any culture that does not hold to enlightenment values. Any culture that treats women as possessions, or refuses to care properly for their children or animals, or who willfully cause environmental destruction and desecrates public space... These are regressive and antiquated features of a distant past and if travelers want their culture to be respected, they need to change their culture to one that is respectable.

Anyone who defends minority 'culture' regardless of the impact it has on people and society is a fool.

I oppose fundamentalist islamic culture, I oppose fundamentalist catholic culture, I oppose fundamentalist traveler culture. If they want to redefine it so that they can be travelers and also productive members of society, I'll be the first one to welcome them aboard.

[Deleted User]

Wibbs wrote: »

Nail on the head. The major problem with all this talk of integration is it is all coming from one side. Travellers are asking for and getting "rights", but where is the social responsibility coming from their community? Where is the condemnation of the very real social disruptive behaviour coming from their community? Wider society be damned it seems, it's all about what we want. And that will work for a while, but what we're seeing more and more is a real impatience among the rest of Irish society.

Have you ever heard anybody condemn a crime on behalf of the settled community?

Organisations like Pavee Point have as their goal an improvement in the social welfare of travellers. They are not some formal representative body, political or otherwise.

It would be no more appropriate for them to condemn travellers than it would be for the Migrant Council to condemn some asylum seeker for stealing a car, or for the IFA to condemn an individual farmer for under-declaring his taxes. That doesn't happen. Nor should it.

In fact, were Pavee Point or similar oganisations to do so, it would risk adding credibility to the slurs of bigots (usually on the internet, or sitting on a barstool) and therefore compound the legitimate grievances felt by travellers, and inflame prejudices.

The authorities in this state which are responsible for the investigation and condemnation of crime, are the Gardai and the courts. It is ridiculous for anyone to claim that any human rights organisation must somehow also take responsibility, like some odd side-enterprise, to condemn members of the community on completely unrelated matters.

The Bishop Basher

Deleted User wrote: »

No. And it could also be based on bigotry and intolerance.

It could.. but we both know it's far more likely that she's had a few run ins with travellers and is wary as a result.. Same as the rest of us..

Deleted User wrote: »

If someone refuses, say, to serve a black person, I appreciate your "we have no idea what experiences have brought them to refuse service" may well apply. But on the face of it, it's not good.

This has been dealt with a couple of times already on this thread. It's not a valid comparison. For the same reasons given above..

NIMAN

The State offers every person in the country the same start in life.

Its up to them, or their family, to decide if they want to take what is offered to them.

Spanish Eyes

end of the road wrote: »

the revenue investigate travelers. all the time and on a huge scale.

I have my suspicions that you might be trolling, but anyway. Oh and while you're at it you might check your spelling and grammar aswell tut tut. :P

Either you work for Revenue, in which case you are breaching the Official Secrets Act, or you are not all there. Revenue do not release statistics based on ethnicity. Have you a link at all for your statement? Guessing not.

The only people that get a mention by Revenue are those who do not make a full disclosure on an audit, then their names are published quarterly. Funnily enough, I have never seen any defaulter described as a Traveller. Have you?

[Deleted User]

Swanner wrote: »

This has been dealt with a couple of times already on this thread. It's not a valid comparison. For the same reasons given above..

No it hasn't! Not satisfactorily.

I tried raising that point by changing the word 'traveller' in an odd anti-traveller rant to 'black person', and some genius kindly pointed out that *actually*, black people tend not to abuse horses.

Oh!!!!!! So it's grand to discriminate against a community where a minority abuse horses, but not a community where a minority have involvement with gun crimes, or crime generally.

The parallels are obvious and it is striking to me how some otherwise intelligent people have their heads so firmly planted in the sand on this issue.

Akrasia

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Have you ever heard anybody condemn a crime on behalf of the settled community?

Organisations like Pavee Point have as their goal an improvement in the social welfare of travellers. They are not some formal representative body, political or otherwise.

It would be no more appropriate for them to condemn travellers than it would be for the Migrant Council to condemn some asylum seeker for stealing a car, or for the IFA to condemn an individual farmer for under-declaring his taxes. That doesn't happen. Nor should it.

In fact, were Pavee Point or similar oganisations to do so, it would risk adding credibility to the slurs of bigots (usually on the internet, or sitting on a barstool) and therefore compound the legitimate grievances felt by travellers, and inflame prejudices.

The authorities in this state which are responsible for the investigation and condemnation of crime, are the Gardai and the courts. It is ridiculous for anyone to claim that any human rights organisation must somehow also take responsibility, like some odd side-enterprise, to condemn members of the community on completely unrelated matters.

If Pavee Point want improvements in the welfare of travelers, then it is absolutely in their interests to do everything they can to assist the state in jailing the criminal elements in their community and enabling the children of those criminals some opportunity for a normal stable upbringing.

There are some extremely violent and unstable people in their community who have absolutely no business raising children.

[Deleted User]

Akrasia wrote: »

If Pavee Point want improvements in the welfare of travelers, then it is absolutely in their interests to do everything they can to assist the state in jailing the criminal elements in their community and enabling the children of those criminals some opportunity for a normal stable upbringing.

And if the National Women's Council want improvements in the lives of women, they should be assisting Gardai in jailing female... shoplifters, say.

Amirite?

Biscuitus

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

To recap, you will write off an entire community of humans, and never give a care about them, because one of them tied a dog to a washing machine?

But they are heartless?

Do you know what a traveller site is? To put this another way if you and a hundred mates went to a field and someone had a dog. That person tied that dog to a tree on leaving and then everyone went home. Understand?

[Deleted User]

Biscuitus wrote: »

Do you know what a traveller site is? To put this another way if you and a hundred mates went to a field and someone had a dog. That person tied that dog to a tree on leaving and then everyone went home. Understand?

Yeah, I would totally compile a spreadsheet of their physical features and if the dominant features were brown-haired, blue-eyed Tipp men, I would never again give a care for a brown-haired, blue-eyed Tipperary man. Then I would tell everyone on the internet, so they would know how dumb I was.

VinLieger

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Is some of it not right there in the OP? The extract you quoted refers to, amongst other things, education...and the writer in the OP refers to her experience of prejudice in education, a teacher refusing to teach her etc.

As i have posted several times in response to this failed argument the teacher was not discriminating they were simply taking into account the fact that a tiny minority of travelers and an even smaller minority of traveler women complete their education due to their parents pulling them out of school

Wibbs

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Have you ever heard anybody condemn a crime on behalf of the settled community?

That's a moronic comparison. For a start the wider society doesn't self identify as "settled". Secondly wider society condemns and punishes crime on a daily basis on behalf of wider society. It's condemned every single day.

It would be no more appropriate for them to condemn travellers than it would be for the Migrant Council to condemn some asylum seeker for stealing a car, or for the IFA to condemn an individual farmer for under-declaring his taxes. That doesn't happen. Nor should it.

One car, one tax dodger? The Travelling community has an endemic anti social behaviour problem. This is a demonstrable fact. By every metric they have higher rates of such behaviour than wider Irish society.

It is ridiculous for anyone to claim that any human rights organisation must somehow also take responsibility, like some odd side-enterprise, to condemn members of the community on completely unrelated matters.

Travellers die younger, marry younger, avoid education, have higher antisocial behaviour and criminality, higher unemployment, higher levels of internecine violence, higher levels of spousal abuse. The list is a very long one and it is directly linked to their lifestyle. A lifestyle that Pavee point seek to defend, yet almost never condemn such issues related to the lifestyle. All about rights with no concomitant responsibilities to clean their own house.

Take this young woman who wrote her article. She stands out as a well rounded educated young woman going somewhere, precisely because it is so vanishingly rare for any traveller to do similar. The vast majority of her peers will be married off with barely an education among them. She is literally the exception that proves the rule.

Like I said moronic comparison.

Spanish Eyes

I have been carded for having views much less vocal than some on here WRT travellers.

A certain mod has not woken from slumber yet it would appear.

Or perhaps free speech is now allowed on Boards. Wasn't always the case when the T word was mentioned.

It is all good. All views should be represented.

Wibbs

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

And if the National Women's Council want improvements in the lives of women, they should be assisting Gardai in jailing female... shoplifters, say.

Amirite?

You would be. If 80% of women were unemployed, if 90% were only educated to primary school level, if the majority of women were married and pregnant by 18, if there were much higher percentages of women in prison, if women were responsible for fighting in the streets, if women were responsible for destroying housing areas built for them. It would be considered equally suspicious if the National Women's Council completely ignored that.

[Deleted User]

Wibbs wrote: »

One car, one tax dodger? The Travelling community has an endemic anti social behaviour problem. This is a demonstrable fact.

Demonstrable is a good word. Demonstrate it, so. Which is more common, farmers under-declaring income to Revenue, or anti-social behaviour amongst travellers?

I would estimate that almost every farmer I know personally, or am related to, has in the past under-declared income. I would withold my subscription to the IFA if they started to waste their resources in assisting Gardai in jailing farmers.

Not because I object to such punishment in itself, but because it is Not. Their. Job.

Akrasia

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

No it hasn't! Not satisfactorily.

I tried raising that point by changing the word 'traveller' in an odd anti-traveller rant to 'black person', and some genius kindly pointed out that *actually*, black people tend not to abuse horses.

Oh!!!!!! So it's grand to discriminate against a community where a minority abuse horses, but not a community where a minority have involvement with gun crimes, or crime generally.

The parallels are obvious and it is striking to me how some otherwise intelligent people have their heads so firmly planted in the sand on this issue.

Most people don't really care that much about travellers horses.

It's more to do with the violence and anti social behaviour that everyone I know has direct personal experience of from members of the traveling community. I have had things stolen from me, I have had knives drawn on me out of nowhere just because I was playing pool with my friends, I have been sucker-punched walking home with my wife by a group of traveller children. I was attacked by dogs running wild every morning when I cycled to school. My mother is living a few doors down from a traveller family with two caravans in their driveway filled with their relatives currently engaged in an active campaign of violence and intimidation of an entire estate.
Travellers shoplifted from our family business routinely and brazenly. Kids used to sit just outside of the gate to our shop forecourt and when they saw an opportunity, they ran into the shop, grabbed stock and ran out. These are just things that I have personal direct experience of. Never mind the countless high profile incidents of violence by travellers whenever they have a wedding or a funeral or decide to chase each other through primary schools with slashhooks or stab taxi drivers for daring to ask them to pay for their ride home.

Traveller camps have destroyed areas of natural beauty and cost hundreds of thousands in cleanup costs where they fly tip their rubbish on the sides of our roads...

I have enormous sympathy for traveller children. They will suffer a lifetime of prejudice and discrimination, but this is not irrational prejudice. It's caused by genuine concerns.

Akrasia

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

And if the National Women's Council want improvements in the lives of women, they should be assisting Gardai in jailing female... shoplifters, say.

Amirite?

what?

[Deleted User]

Akrasia wrote: »

It would help if they didn't keep burning down the houses we build for them

Classy, in a thread in which the article in the OP was about a persons reaction to the Carrickmines tragedy.