Eamon Dillon - Gypsy Empire

Contents

Irish Travellers have never enjoyed a higher profile, at home and abroad, for good reasons and bad. On the one hand are the positive stories like the success of boxers such as John Joe Nevin and Tyson Fury, the popularity of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and Paddy Dohertys victory on Celebrity Big Brother. On the other are controversial news stories such as the Dale Farm stand-off and the recent convictions for slavery.

Gypsy Empire delves into the heart of Traveller life, focusing on three aspects that have coloured perceptions of Travellers among the wider community: family feuds, bare-knuckle fights and trading. Many Irish Travellers are driven by the need to prove their status among their own, a powerful instinct epitomised by those who engage in brutal bare-knuckle fights. These bouts are fuelled by family feuds which sometimes erupt in vicious acts of violence. We meet many colourful characters, among them some of the worlds most prolific and gifted criminals, their self-reliance providing an edge over other crime gangs.

This is a golden era for the Traveller clans which are expanding and growing like never before. Gypsy Empire takes the reader inside the hidden world of Irish Travellers.

TRANSWORLD IRELAND
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448168125
GYPSY EMPIRE
A TRANSWORLD IRELAND BOOK: 9781848271692
First published in 2013 by Transworld Ireland,
a division of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Eamon Dillon 2013

Eamon Dillon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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Irish Travellers are a bright light burning furiously. They constitute a young community in Ireland, where more than half their people are under the age of twenty. Their average age is twenty-two compared to thirty-six in the wider society, according to Irelands Central Statistics Office.

The origins of Irish Travellers are unclear. It is sometimes argued that they are the descendants of nomadic artisans and entertainers from as far back as the fifth century, and that the clans each stayed within the boundaries of one of the seven kingdoms of ancient Ireland, taking their names, such as Ward or McDonagh, from the reigning monarch.

They are a distinct social group, separate from the majority of Irish society. The last census in Ireland suggested that there are thirty thousand people in Ireland who regard themselves as Irish Travellers. There is a similar number living in the UK. In the UK they are recognized as a separate ethnicity, and they are now claiming a similar status in Ireland. As a community, their population is much the same size as that of a town such as Tralee in Ireland or Cleethorpes in England not very big. It is estimated that there are another thirty thousand Travellers in the United States, made up of both recent arrivals and those descended from immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Many Travellers speak their own dialect or gammon which, to an outsider, is as indecipherable as any exotic language. There is debate about whether it is a true language with its own grammar and structure, or is merely a verlan, or an argot, based on English and using coded or corrupted words from English, Gaelic and Latin. Irish Travellers are a separate entity from Roma Gypsies and from the English Traveller community, but the term Gypsy is often applied to Irish Travellers as it is to the Sinti people in Germany or the Kale from the Iberian peninsula. In their own language Irish Travellers refer to themselves as Pavee.

A key feature of Irish Traveller life is the longing to be nomadic. Different families have different approaches to being on the road. Some may spend extended periods, lasting several years, constantly moving between campsites across dozens of countries, while others may never leave their home, be it a caravan or a house. This aspect of Traveller life is often expressed through their love of horses and their attachment to the piebald and skewbald ponies used to race their sulkies on Sunday mornings.

In contrast to the wider community, many but not all Traveller families prefer to live in close proximity to members of their own extended clan. This applies to both those who spend their time travelling and those who prefer a more sedentary lifestyle. This clannishness is one of those aspects of Traveller life that can provoke fear and anger among their neighbours in the wider community.

Irish Travellers have remained marginalized from the rest of society. This is due in part to the conscious choice of Travellers to remain separate, but also because state policies in Ireland and the UK have failed to come up with any strategies for better integration.

This failure to find common ground is most obvious when it comes to accommodation for Travellers. Large-scale halting sites developed without permission can flare up into major sources of controversy, as evidenced by the row over Dale Farm in Essex that culminated in the enforced clearance of the site in 2011. In Ireland, houses bought for Traveller families have been burned down to prevent them moving in, while specifically built accommodation has been destroyed in the course of inter-Traveller feuds.

Any Irish journalist working a crime beat will at some point end up reporting on Irish Travellers. This is not because Travellers are any more naturally predisposed to committing crime or falling victim to it than any other section of society, but because many of them live on the margins of society, where those kinds of bad things happen. If a town of the same population were generating as many crime stories for the media, it would raise the question: What the hell is going on?

The Irish Prison Service doesnt keep count of the number of Irish Travellers who are incarcerated. In an effort to obtain this information I recently spoke to contacts in the jail system. That day, when the prison population was around 3,500, my sources came back with approximate figures totalling 340, suggesting around 9 per cent of prisoners were Travellers. To put that into perspective, if the number of Traveller prisoners was in proportion to their size in the wider population, then there should have been just twenty-one in prison that day. Even if my estimated figure had been twice the actual number it would still have been way out of synch. If it was a town, the Irish Traveller community would need to have its own jail the size of Castlerea Prison in Roscommon, which is one of Irelands eleven closed institutions for people in custody.