Travellers and the Irish State
STUDIES :: In this 2015 article, Bryan Fanning details the origins of modern government approaches to ‘dealing with’ the Travelling community, and how the community has been represented across different eras of the Irish state.
The extract below expands on how the policies of the 1950s-1980s have maintained their reach today. In addition, he outlines the irony in governmental/societal representations of Travellers pastiching the racist caricatures of the Irish that were commonplace throughout the 19th century.
A regular contributor to Studies, Bryan Fanning is Professor of Migration and Social Policy in University College Dublin. His research interests include the modernisation of Irish society, with a focus on the history of ideas and debates that have shaped its development and the intellectual history of social policy. His current research is focused upon how different understandings of moral issues and public morality influence thinking about social policy.
Bryan Fanning, ‘New Rules of Belonging: How Travellers Came to be Depicted as Enemies of Progress’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 104, No. 415 (Autumn, 2015), 302-312. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24640669
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The second canonical text of this new developmental nation-building project was the OECD/lrish Government 1965 report, Investment in Education. This has been credited with jolting the focus of Irish education from religious formation to economic development…Investment in Education steered Irish education policy onto a path that continues to be followed. ‘As education is at once a cause and a consequence of economic growth’, the report declared, ‘economic planning is incomplete without educational planning. Education, as well as having its own intrinsic values, is a necessary element in economic activity’.The Travellers
The far-less-celebrated Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963) warrants inclusion in the canon of Irish developmental texts. In advocating the assimilation of what were then called itinerants or tinkers, it suggested new modern rules of belonging for all. The economic ‘take-off’ that began in the late 1950s changed Ireland from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society. It also resulted in the displacement of the Travelling People, the name they preferred, from their precarious niche in rural society. The Commission was set up at a time when Travellers had become displaced from the rural economy and were identified as an urban (and suburban) problem by the majority community. The impetus that led to its establishment is captured in the title of Aoife Bhreatnach’s Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State 1922-70. The terms of reference of the Commission on Itinerancy (1960-1963) required it ‘to enquire into the problem arising from the presence in the country of itinerants in considerable numbers’, and to consider what steps might be taken ‘to promote their absorption into the general community’, and ‘pending such absorption, to reduce to a minimum the disadvantages to themselves and to the community resulting from their itinerant habits’.
The origin of the Travellers is unclear. It seems that, prior to the Famine, their ancestors comprised but one element of a large permanent and seasonally migrant population. Prior to the Famine, the First Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (1835), which examined poverty in seventeen Irish counties, depicted a complex rural society, within which there were strong social bonds between sedentary and migratory ways of life. Small tenant farmers were part of a peasantry touched by the need for seasonal migration. They were obliged by customs of hospitality to give alms to those seasonal beggars unable to subsist for the entire year on their own rented smallholding and to various other categories of dispossessed vagrants. For example, there is frequent reference in the 1835 report to the practice of older parents, having made over their land to their children in the expectation of being supported by them, leaving home at times of shortage to go begging, and often not returning.
The post-1847 Famine devastated this marginal peasantry. In its aftermath, rural Irish society changed utterly. What was depicted by visiting anthropologists like Arensberg and Kimball during the 1930s as a traditional rural society was in fact a modem one. New forms of inheritance and moral regulation came to be imposed after the Famine; the rural population declined rapidly, smallholdings were consolidated and, with the success of the agrarian nationalist campaigns of the Land League some decades later, Ireland’s surviving peasantry became conservative landowners.
The ancestors of Travellers subsisted as a landless class within rural society. They retained a distinct if marginal economic role within rural society until at least the 1950s, when their skills and trades became obsolete. By the 1960s, Travellers had become economically and socially displaced from rural society. The general movement of Travellers to urban centres was part of broader demographic changes in Irish society. When they became a visible presence on the outskirts of towns and cities, they became a political problem akin to, if on a much smaller scale, the unwanted rural poor who flocked to the shanty towns and favelas of South American cities.
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A previous attempt to deal with the children of vagrants, the 1942 School Attendance Bill had been passed by the Dáil and the Seanad; this required vagrants to register particulars of their families and of the education being received by their children at their local Garda station. The Bill proposed to grant powers to the State to commit children to industrial schools. However, the President refused to sign the bill and it had been, as Haughey put it, ‘considered repugnant to the Constitution by the Supreme Court’.
The sort of coercion considered in 1942 resembled somewhat, in its intent, the policy at the time in Australia of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families. It was also in keeping with how Ireland sequestered its unmarried mothers in Magdelene laundries and its vulnerable children in industrial schools. In 1966, Clare County Council debated a proposal to confine all itinerants living within a twenty or thirty mile radius of Limerick city within a regional camp where the children could be educated, in one place, about how the settled way of life was better than a nomadic one. At the meeting it was agreed that Clare County Council, in conjunction with Limerick County Council, Limerick City Corporation and Tipperary North Riding Council, would request the Minister for Defence to make the proposed site, a surplus army barracks at Knocknalisheen, available. However, nothing of the sort had been countenanced by the Commission, for all that it concluded was that the itinerant way of life was unacceptable in modern Ireland:
For both social and economic reasons it is clearly undesirable that a section of the population should be isolated and follow a way of life which is harsh, primitive and of low economic value both to those who follow it and to the nation and, most important, which tends to create a closed and separate community which will become increasingly inferior to the rest of the national population and from which it will become increasingly difficult to escape.
Changing rules of belonging
The Commission’s 1963 report was stronger on diagnosis than on prescriptions. It emphasised that the rules of belonging of Irish society were being changed by ‘the ever-rising standards of living of settled people’ and the ‘static, if not deteriorating, standards of itinerants’ would further exclude them from this modernising society. It argued that ‘the ever-growing disparity in relative social standards must render more difficult the mental adjustment which will be required of the settled people’ to put up the long-standing ways of life of the itinerants: ‘The plight of itinerants and their isolation by the settled community, which is becoming progressively worse, is a serious problem and one which has not troubled the public conscience to any degree’. Rising standards of education amongst the ‘ordinary population’ were deemed likely to increase the social distance between the ‘ordinary population’ and the mostly-illiterate itinerants.
Social distance is a sociological concept used to gauge levels of acceptance and intolerance of those perceived to be different than the norm or, to put it another way, to gauge how the dominant majority group in a society feels about different minority groups. In a chapter on the ‘Attitude of Settled Population to Itinerants’, the Commission stated that:
The attitudes of most of the settled people… is one of hostility often accompanied by fear. In addition, in nearly all areas itinerants are despised as inferior beings and are regarded as the dregs of society. Many feel that they would demean themselves by associating with them. Their presence is considered to lower the tone of a neighborhood.
The majority of the settled population wish to avoid any contact with itinerants in any form and break off any contact that is established as soon as possible. Aoife Bhreatnach summarised the social contract proposed by the Commission on Itinerancy as follows: ‘Travellers were asked to surrender nomadism, family economy, self-employment, flexible work patterns, horses and their own homes for dubious pleasures of public housing, full time school attendance, subsistence on welfare benefits and organised charity’. In return they could expect to gain better living conditions and a more regulated existence. However, the Commission were hardly optimistic that what was being proposed would work. A major barrier preventing their settlement and assimilation was prejudice amongst what referred to as the ‘ordinary population’:
The attitude of the settled population in so far as itinerants are concerned is not confined to those on the road. It has been brought to the notice of the Commission that some families of itinerant extraction who managed to settle in different areas are still, often scornfully, known as ‘tinkers’, even in succeeding generations. This must affect the ability of such families to live a normal life and must be taken into account in estimating the time necessary to achieve complete integration.
Itinerants find it difficult to find many forms of employment because of their background and the unwillingness of some employees to associate with them. The Commission is aware of at least one case where an itinerant girl whose origin was unknown to an employer and for whom she worked very satisfactorily as a waitress in a hotel was dismissed because of an objection of a customer who recognised her.Hostility and denigration
The remedies proposed by the Commission could not overcome the patterns of prejudice it identified. Efforts to settle Travellers in designated halting sites were blocked by local politicians representing residents of whatever areas were proposed. Much of the schooling provided for Traveller children was segregated and designed so that there would be no contact with settled children.
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The absence of a final solution to the Traveller problem – the means to compel Travellers to integrate into a society that despised them and that placed insurmountable political obstacles against nearly every effort to settle them – has for decades drip-fuelled further hostility and intolerance within local politics and in the media. To take one 1996 example of the latter (there are so many to choose from), Mary Ellen Synon declared that their way of life was:
… a life of appetite ungoverned by intellect ….. It is a life worse than the life of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals. This tinker ‘culture’ is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of the surprising things about it is that not every individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil.
This seems to be almost a deliberate pastiche of nineteenth-century denigrations of the Irish of the kind examined in Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971) by Liz Curtis…As put by the French liberal Gustave de Beaumont in 1839:
We are so poor! is the reply of the Irish peasants, when they are reproached with increasing their misery by neglect; and as they continue in the filth that chokes their hovels, without the slightest wish to keep them clean. Irish intemperance and love of whisky, one of the most deplorable of the national vices, arises from the same source. As he believes it impossible ever to establish any durable accordance between his income and expenses, he dissipates without scruple the moderate wages of his temporary employment. Scarcely has he received his wages, when he runs to the whisky shop, and for a moment at least, drowns his misery in drunkenness and brutalisation.
Thus, by the very condition of the people, all the vices usually produced by extreme misery are naturally explained. Thus also the secondary vices, which are the usual accompaniments of those I have mentioned, may also be explained; thus the Irishman, precisely because he does nothing, boasts and blusters; as he has a master, he is a flatterer, and full of insolence when he is not cringing. These vices, indeed, add to his misery, but they were first derived from it. From the same source that his other pernicious inclinations flow, is derived that sad habit of falsehood, and that frightful predisposition to the most cruel and most iniquitous outrages.
There is no need of a very deep study of the character and habits of the Irish people to discover that they are often deficient in the most simple notions of good and evil, of right and wrong.
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Photo: Irish travellers in England: Geoff Charles, from National Library of Wales (Public Domain)