Irish Travellers

George Gmelch, Sharon Bohn Gmelch

Description

Honorable Mention, 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, Social Sciences2015 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

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Anthropologists George and Sharon Gmelch have been studying the quasi-nomadic people known as Travellers since their fieldwork in the early 1970s, when they lived among Travellers and went on the road in their own horse-drawn wagon. In 2011 they returned to seek out families they had known decades before—shadowed by a film crew and taking with them hundreds of old photographs showing the Travellers' former way of life. Many of these images are included in this book, alongside more recent photos and compelling personal narratives that reveal how Traveller lives have changed now that they have left nomadism behind.

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Folclore
• Sociology
• General officer
• Ireland
• Irish Traveller
• History of Europe
• Anthropology
• Stephen Ireland
• General
• Travellers
• Folklore
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014610
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Irish Travellers

Sharon Bohn Gmelch George Gmelch
Irish Travellers
THE UNSETTLED LIFE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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Fax [phone]
2014 by George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Irish travellers : the unsettled life / Sharon Bohn Gmelch and George Gmelch.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-253-01453-5 (paperback)-ISBN 978-0-253-01461-0 (ebook) 1. Irish Travellers (Nomadic people) 2. Irish Travellers (Nomadic people)-Pictorial works. 3. Irish Travellers (Nomadic people)-Social conditions. 4. Ireland-Ethnic relations. I. Gmelch, George. II. Title.
DA927.4.T72G64 2014
305.9 0691809415-dc23
2014011875
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
To the Connors, Donoghue, and Maughan families of Holylands and their descendants

CONTENTS
1 From Tinkers to Travellers
2 First Fieldwork
3 Return to a Changing Ireland
4 Cork
5 Kathleen Mongan Keenan Pushed from Pillar to Post
6 The Road to Ennis
7 Galway
8 Paddy Houlahan Living on the Edge of Your Town
9 Tuam
10 Mary Warde Moriarty Not All Travellers Wanted the Same Thing
11 Martin Ward We ve Come a Long Way
12 Full Circle
13 Martin Collins Traveller Politics Have Been My Life
14 Unsettled Identity, Unsettled Life
Acknowledgments
Notes
Irish Travellers
1
FROM TINKERS TO TRAVELLERS
T HE TRAVELLING PEOPLE HAVE, FOR GENERATIONS, STOOD ON THE BOTTOM rung of Ireland s social and economic ladder, a poor and stigmatized minority group. Until the 1960s most traveled through the countryside, at first on foot and later in horse-drawn carts and wagons, performing a variety of trades and services. Despite the value of the services they provided, they were regarded as inferior and regularly discriminated against, especially once they began migrating to urban areas in search of work. They were commonly called tinkers (from the trade of tinsmithing), knackers (from the practice of selling old horses for slaughter), and, beginning in the 1960s, itinerants (the less pejorative term introduced by government).
Although their lifestyle was and continues to be outwardly similar to that of English Gypsies or Roma, the Travelling People are native to Ireland. They are one of numerous indigenous nomadic groups-including the Swedish Resande, Norwegian Taters, Dutch Woonwagonbewoners, and Scottish Travellers-that have existed in Western Europe. Today approximately 29,000 Travellers live among a population of 4.5 million settled Irish, and they remain one of the least assimilated of Europe s itinerant groups. 1
The early history of Ireland s Travelling People is obscure. Being illiterate, they left no written records of their own. As poor people living on the margin of settled society, they were largely ignored in Ireland s recorded history and literary works. 2 Genetic research conducted in the 1970s and an analysis of the DNA of forty individuals in 2010 clearly show, however, that Travellers are native to Ireland and have lived there as long as anyone. Such research also conclusively shows that they are not Roma. Beyond that, only one thing is certain: not all Travelling families originated at the same time or in the same way. Some families nomadism dates back centuries, while for others it is more recent. And many have genealogies mixed with both Travellers and settled people. Some undoubtedly began to travel as itinerant craftsmen and specialists because of the limited demand for their work in any one place. Others were originally peasants and laborers who voluntarily went on the road to look for work or else were forced onto it by eviction or for some personal reason-a problem with drink, the birth of an illegitimate child, or marriage to a tinker.

John Ward fashions tins on the roadside outside Galway City in 1972. Chimney sweeping equipment is tied to his bicycle.
Throughout Ireland s history a variety of occupational groups were nomadic. As early as the fifth century, metal workers or whitesmiths traveled the countryside fashioning jewelry, weapons, and horse trappings out of bronze, silver, and gold in exchange for food and lodging. Other specialists, including weavers, thatchers, musicians, and bards, also traveled Ireland s roads in past centuries. Ward, the Anglicized form of the Irish Mac an Bhaird , meaning son of the bard, is one of the most common Traveller surnames, and the Wards are regarded by other Travellers as one of the oldest families on the road. 3
In the twelfth century, tinker and tynkere appear in written records as trade or surnames for the first time. (The word tinker derives from the sound of the smith s hammer striking metal.) By the sixteenth century, itinerant tinkers were numerous enough in Ireland and Scotland to give newly arriving Roma stiff competition. Tinkers are specifically mentioned in the numerous statutes enacted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in the British Isles against vagrancy and begging. By 1835, when Britain s Poor Inquiry Commissioners visited Ireland-then a British colony-to collect evidence on the state of the poor, local people differentiated tinkers from other people then living on the road. A resident of county Mayo reported, The wives and families accompany the tinker while he strolls about in search of work, and always beg. They intermarry with one another, and form a distinct class. A resident of Donegal similarly stated that they were the only class of beggars whose habits of mendicancy become hereditary; the other vagrants beg through [temporary] want of employment. 4 Yet another respondent described three generations traveling the roads together, which, at the very minimum, meant that they had been itinerant since the late 1700s.
At the outbreak of World War II, Ireland s Travellers were still a nomadic and rural people. Their most common occupations, besides making tinware, were cleaning chimneys, dealing in donkeys and horses, peddling small household wares, and picking crops, all in exchange for food, clothing, and cash. While many Travellers had a primary trade, they were also opportunistic. As one man we knew astutely stated, The tinker was a man who thought of a hundred ways of surviving. If he was selling delph [crockery] and the delph failed him, he d switch to something else. Maybe he d buy something else or resell it. There were always a hundred ways out. This was the real tinker, not the tinsmith. He was a better survivor than the rest. Travellers also made clothespins, brooms, and baskets; repaired umbrellas; sharpened knives; collected and recycled horse hair, feathers, and bottles; and exploited the superstitions and hopes of the settled population through begging, fortune telling, and bogus money-making schemes. They were truly jacks of all trades.
Most families traveled and camped on the roadside from St. Patrick s Day in mid-March (when, it was said, the stones turned over in the water and the cold went out of the winter) until November, when wet, bone-chilling weather returned. Some then moved into modest cottages in what they considered to be their home village, while others took shelter in abandoned waste houses in the countryside. While traveling, families seldom remained in one place for more than a couple of weeks, staying only as long as work was available. Most families traveled regular circuits through two or three neighboring counties and were well known to local people, even acquiring affectionate nicknames like Bawling Moll. But some families traveled widely and had weaker ties to the settled population. And although Travellers were valued for the services they performed and for the news and stories they carried, most country people were also glad to see them go. Nomads are usually regarded with a degree of suspicion by sedentary populations, no matter how mutually beneficial their relationship.

Mother and children line up for a photograph in front of their shelter tents on the northern outskirts of Dublin, 1975.

Travellers migrating to Dublin in search of a livelihood cross the Liffey River in 1972.
As Ireland developed following World War II, the rural economy of Travellers changed dramatically. Plastic containers and the availability of cheap mass-produced tin and enamelware eliminated the tinsmith s work. Other trades and services also rapidly became obsolete. With the introduction of tractors and farm machinery like the beet digger, the demand for the horses some Travellers dealt in and the need for seasonal agricultural laborers disappeared. As rural bus service expanded and more country people could afford cars, shopping in town became easier, and people no longer needed the small goods that Travelling women once brought to their doors. Some Travellers moved to England at this time to work on construction sites or to collect scrap metal. Most, however