What is anti-Travellerism?

Clearly anti-Travellerism has to be in some way connected to the notion of the ‘Travellers’ as a subject. Here we can begin with a self-defined people known to themselves as Minceir or Pavees and more generally as Irish Travellers or Travellers. Beyond this, however, even Irish legislation is far from clear who Travellers are and how they should be defined. For example, there is a marked difference between the Republic of Ireland 1988 Housing Act which regards Travellers as a people who are nomadic (regardless of ethnicity) and the Northern Ireland 1997 Race Relations Order which defines Travellers as a ‘racial group’ (almost regardless of nomadism). These definitions have been incorporated into all subsequent Traveller-related legislation in the two jurisdictions.

In terms of the phenomenon of anti-Travellerism, however, the constructed notion of ‘the Traveller’ is as important as the relationship to an identifiable ethnic group. From Synge's ‘The Tinker's Wedding’ to Patrick Bergin's ‘The Knacker’, the ‘Traveller’ has provided a monstrous, threatening Other to both colonial and post-colonial Irish respectability. ‘We’ are never quite sure why the ‘Lady’ in the ‘Raggle, Taggle Gypsies’ prefers a ‘kiss from the yellow Gypsy's lips’ to all her ‘Lord's’ wealth and power but it speaks to a profoundly disturbing and subversive archetype for ‘settled’ society. We can suggest therefore that the key function of the term ‘Traveller’ (or ‘knacker’ or ‘Gyppo’) is not that it defines a member of a particular ethnic group but rather that for dominant, hegemonic, sedentary Ireland it defines who ‘we’ are not (ní Shuinéar, Reference Ní Shuinéar, Lentin and McVeigh2002).

The combination of fear and contempt in anti-Traveller discourse has changed remarkably little over time. It is a classic example of racist anti-nomadism or sedentarism focused on a specific ethnic group (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh and Acton1997a). Definitively, anti-Travellerism in Ireland has carried with it a constant genocidal logic (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh, Peillon and Fahy1997b). In this sense, Charles Haughey's commitment to a ‘final solution’ at the launch of the Commission on Itinerancy was not an unfortunate faux pas, but rather the commencement of a state project that understood precisely the implications of its language. Travellers were constructed as a ‘problem’ and ‘absorbing them’ was the ‘final solution’. This does not imply that the Irish Government were Nazis or that they were contemplating a physical genocide. It does insist, however, that the genocidal logic of assimilation be taken seriously. It is also important to remember that the various methodologies of the Nazi ‘final solution’ have been routinely advocated by Irish politicians as solutions to the Traveller ‘problem’. These have included ‘shooting’, ‘tagging’, ‘castration’, ‘internment in concentration camps’, and ‘incineration’ (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh1992b: 360–364; McVeigh, Reference McVeigh, Peillon and Fahy1997b).

Anti-Travellerism like this is repeated and reworked in local and national media, in local councils and the Dáil and in pubs and living rooms across Ireland. The most notorious recent example of anti-Travellerism was a newspaper article by Mary Ellen Synon which appeared under the banner headline, ‘Time to get tough on tinker terror “culture”‘:

This remains the definitive précis of anti-Travellerism as discourse. This Traveller ‘lifestyle’ is so palpably worthless and repulsive that it cannot but be in the Nazi sense, ‘a life unworthy of living’ (Agamben, Reference Agamben1995).

The anti-Travellerism directed towards Pavees and Minceirs is also a specifically Irish phenomenon (Lentin and McVeigh, Reference Lentin and McVeigh2006: 127–144). Of course, people and states have been hostile to Irish Travellers elsewhere than Ireland – particularly in England, Scotland and Wales and the US.Footnote ³ But only in Ireland has this generated a discrete and integrated culture and politics – and associated state intervention. The state in Ireland, north and south, has routinely insisted that the existence of Irish Travellers (or ‘tinkers’ or ‘itinerants’) – rather than anti-Traveller racism – is ‘the problem’. The state has also been gradually implementing a ‘satisfactory solution of the problem’ – settlement and absorption. Moreover, the state in Ireland, north and south, has long suggested that getting rid of Travellers is in the interest of Travellers – as well as everyone else.

There have also, of course, been marked changes in the politics of state reformism with regard to Irish Travellers, both before and after the high watermark of the release of the Task Force Report in 1995. Even here, however, it becomes clear that there is no simple dichotomy between ‘bad’ anti-Traveller policies and ‘good’ pro-Traveller polices of the state (ní Shuinéar, 1997). The tone of state discourse may change – from ‘problem’ to ‘respect’ – but the intentions can be just as brutal and sometimes even more engaged when the state begins to act ‘in the interests of Travellers’. Arguably for ethnic nomads being neglected by the state is often far less oppressive than being ‘protected’ or ‘respected’ by it.

We must therefore problematise any state reformism with regard to Travellers – including state anti-racism and multiculturalism. At the minimum, however, reformism marks the transition from physical genocide to cultural genocide as the guiding principle of state policy. Beyond this, it moves, however grudgingly, towards a recognition that Travellers as Travellers had some inherent positive value and some basic right to exist. None of this movement was, of course, a gift of the state – it is mostly the result of the struggles of Travellers and the Traveller Support Movement. Moreover, these struggles themselves are multiply coded. We need to remember that in Ireland the Travellers Support Movement in its first incarnation as the ‘Itinerant Settlement Movement’ followed from the Commission on Itinerancy – NGO activity was a direct product of state reformism. However, even when ‘itinerant settlement’ was the watchword of the movement, it contained settled people and Travellers who did not want to ‘solve itinerancy’ and ‘get rid’ of Travellers. The movement itself was a key site of struggle in terms of the politics of reformism and ethnicity denial. Changes in state policy have to be seen in the context of the politics of these struggles – with Travellers as actors rather than victims and the Traveller Support Movement – from the ISM and Minceir Misli to Pavee Point and the ITM and An Munya Tober – as a key part of the equation. The genealogy of the Traveller Support Movement has thus had its own autonomous logic and is far more than a simple ‘front’ for state anti-Travellerism.

In the middle of this, however, we still find the state as the key structuring element of both repression and reform for Travellers in Ireland. Of course, the state formations that Travellers engaged with were strikingly different, north and south of the border, and changed significantly over time. There were also key differences north and south in terms of Traveller demography and the politics and strength of the Traveller Support Movement. All of these factors encouraged significant differences in the trajectories of state reformism with regard to Travellers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Reformism and anti-Travellerism in the Republic of Ireland

The assimilation of Travellers became a project of the new, post-colonial state in Ireland after 1922 (Delaney, Reference Delaney2001; Donahue et al., Reference Donahue, McVeigh, Robbie and Maureen2006; McLaughlin, 1995; Lentin and McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2007: 127–134). As early as 1925, concerns were being expressed in the Dáil about, ‘the children of travelling gypsies’ who ‘do not attend school’, ‘grow up wild’ and ‘if not looked after they become apaches’. As a foretaste of state interventions to come and, without any conscious irony, it was suggested that, ‘something should be done for children like these and that their position should be brought to the attention of the police’. The context of the ‘something’ to be done was explicit: ‘They are growing up without education and will be a danger if something is not done for them’ (Dáil Éireann, Volume 13, 3 December 1925, emphasis added).

From this point, the notion that ‘we’ must do something for Travellers because otherwise they will be danger to ‘us’ defines the character of policies towards Travellers. The control and repression of Travellers was completely normalised across the criminal justice system. For example, the Gárda Síochána in the south (and the RUC in the north) were charged with producing ‘counts’ or censuses of Travellers, yet they had neither responsibility for any other ethnic group nor competency in demography. In discussions with the Minister of Justice, it was routine to couch the issue in terms of Travellers ‘infesting’ the country and posing a ‘menace to the social order’ (Dáil Éireann, Volume 94, 19 September, 1944 ‘Tinkers and other Vagrants’). The southern state began to intervene directly in a more reformist manner, however, with the Commission on Itinerancy which was established in 1960 and reported in 1963 (Department of Social Welfare, 1963). This marked the beginning of an explicit settlement policy:

The conclusions of the Commission were thus explicitly sedentarist and assimilationist – it unapologetically regarded the end of Traveller nomadism and Traveller identity as positive goals. The state would ‘improve the lot’ of Travellers by ending their existence as a distinct people. The question of what the Irish state was to do about Travellers was reformulated again in the 1980s with the 1983 Report of the Travelling People Review Body and again in the 1995 Task Force Report on the Travelling Community. The Task Force Report was much stronger on the positive aspects of Traveller culture. It too, however, failed to identify Travellers as an ethnic group. Moreover it carried a ‘minority opinion’ representing politicians and bureaucrats on the Task Force which continued to insist on a more traditional anti-Traveller analysis: ‘such a lifestyle will always place those who participate in it at a disadvantage in terms of accessibility to health and education services, jobs opportunities and general services like insurances, loans, mortgages etc. and these facts must be acknowledged by those who espouse it for themselves and for their children’ (Task Force, 1995: 289).

So while the reformist paradigm had changed in the seventy years since the 1925 talk of children ‘growing up wild’ and ‘becoming apaches’ and a ‘danger to society’, it had not changed all that much. Following the Task Force, there is a new state reformist infrastructure in place – including the High Level GroupFootnote ⁴ and the NTMAC.Footnote ⁵ But this infrastructure has two key flaws – first, it moved away from the principle of the inclusion of Travellers and the Traveller Support Movement in decision-making which had been established by the Task Force; second, it failed to do anything to mediate the raft of anti-Traveller measures implemented by other state agencies. Thus contemporary state reformism is capable of acknowledging that there is, ‘much that still needs to be done to make Ireland a better place for Travellers’ (Department of Justice, 2006: 16) but apparently incapable of doing much about it.

Circumstances surrounding the killing of John Ward perhaps best emblemise the contemporary reality of the criminal justice system for Travellers. Ward was killed with a shotgun as he left a farm ‘in manifest retreat’, yet his killer was found not guilty of murder and later, on appeal, of manslaughter (Lentin and McVeigh, Reference Lentin and McVeigh2006: 128–129; RTE News, 2006). More broadly, the Irish state has pursued a policy of anti-Travellerism over recent years with renewed vigour. Here we find four key interventions – the criminalisation of trespass, the winding up of Citizen Traveller, the removal of discrimination cases involving licensed premises from the Equality Tribunal to the District Court and the ongoing denial of Traveller ethnicity by the Irish Government. First, Section 24 of the Housing Act 2002 marked a new assault on Traveller identity and the end of any meaningful ‘partnership’ between Travellers and government.Footnote ⁶ In a direct response, the government-sponsored Citizen Traveller campaign produced an advertisement against the Housing Act. This argued: ‘Suddenly, in caring Ireland, to be a Traveller is a terrible crime. The racist and unworkable law on trespass criminalises 1,200 unaccommodated Traveller families’ (The Traveller, 2002: 11). Almost immediately the Citizen Traveller campaign was ‘wound up’ by the Irish government. A review of the Campaign indicated ‘concerns over its management and direction’ and suggested that the, ‘Campaign focused exclusively on the Traveller perspective’. The Minister of Justice suggested that, ‘the best way forward [was] an orderly winding up of the project’ (RTÉ News, 2002). The removal of discrimination cases involving licensed premises from the Equality Tribunal to the District Court negated one of the key mechanisms of the equality infrastructure that had delivered any benefits for Travellers. The consequence was effectively to re-segregate the only public spaces which had been opened to Travellers through equality measures.

The final indication of the chill wind blowing towards Travellers is the ongoing process of ethnicity denial engaged in by the Irish State. This reversed a process whereby most politicians and Government representatives had accepted the reality of Traveller ethnicity (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2007).Footnote ⁷ Once again this intervention was led by the Department of Justice (Dáil Debates, 15 October 2003). It was formally confirmed by the submission of the Irish Government to CERD:

It is important to force the logic of this ethnicity denial (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2007). First, it bears emphasis that there are no grounds for Travellers experiencing racism if ethnicity is denied. The Irish Government has said as much: ‘Travellers do not appear to fall within the definition of racial discrimination.’ Although this Irish Government has not done this yet in terms of its domestic policy, ethnicity denial inevitably leads to racism denial. The Government continued to include an addendum to the CERD report on Travellers but this looked like an exercise in further obsfuscation. If, as the Irish Government insists, Travellers are not an ethnic group and do not experience racial discrimination, then they surely have no place in the report. The logic which forces Travellers from the body of the text to the appendix and then to the footnotes and then sees them excised completely, seems inexorable. We are thus likely to see the attempt to remove Travellers from the anti-racism constituency as the capacity of Travellers to experience racism is increasingly denied. Second, the grounds for recognising and respecting Traveller ‘cultural difference’ are now particularly unclear. Since Travellers don't cut it as an ethnic group, what exactly is the nature of this ‘difference’ and why should it be respected? Once ethnicity is denied, we are only a hair's breadth away from Mary Ellen Synon's culture ‘without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition’. And why would any sensible state protect or support or respect such a culture? How much more sensible to return to assimilationism and try to ‘absorb’ such people into the ‘general community’.

Alongside these recent reversals, there have been broad failures in terms of the equality-based outcomes that had been both demanded and promised by the Task Force. As Pavee Point recently suggested:

This echoes the conclusion of the Irish Government's Committee to Monitor and Co-ordinate the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Task Force on the Traveller Community, which reported dolefully in 2005:

This Committee was disbanded by the Department of Justice before it could report again. There could be no more appropriate metaphor for the dissipation of the hopes associated with the Task Force and the failure of this model of state reformism.

Reformism and anti-Travellerism in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland was the first place anywhere that engaged with the question of dealing with Irish Travellers as a specific project of the state. While concerns about Travellers were raised from the foundation of Northern Ireland, by the end of the Second World War they had become a ‘problem’ for the modernising state (Noonan, Reference Noonan and Hainsworth1998: 154). Thus the Stormont Government established two separate commissions in the 1940s and 1950s to address the ‘Gypsy problem’ (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1948, 1955). Since northern discourse also carried the additional construction of Travellers as a southern Irish population, anti-Travellerism often took on a bizarre anti-immigrant logic. This continues in contemporary northern anti-Travellerism which can be consumed by the menace of ‘non-indigenous travellers’ who threaten to ‘influx’ the north (Lentin and McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2007: 134).

The anti-Travellerism of the northern state finally produced perhaps the most abhorrent state intervention of all – the concept and policy of designation (CCRU, 1992). Designation was a legal process that allowed the state to ‘designate’ certain councils as qualified to operate additional powers of eviction to control the growth of long-term residence by Travellers on unapproved sites in their area (CCRU, 1992). In practice designation worked on a similar basis to apartheid ‘group areas’ – setting quotas on the numbers of Travellers with access to particular areas and excluding others. The notion of designation carries an even more sinister logic, although this was never realised since not all councils in the north achieved designated status. In a situation in which all Councils are designated, any ‘additional’ Travellers above this notional ‘acceptable’ figure have legally nowhere to go. In this context, Traveller identity is criminalised whatever Travellers might choose to do.

Ironically the relative weakness of the Traveller Support Movement in the north resulted in Traveller equality issues being more firmly integrated into growing demands for anti-racist legislation. Crucially this meant that recognition of Traveller ethnicity became a key demand of the wider lobby for anti-racist legislation. The British Government tried not to concede this point in the north – only allowing that ‘traditional Irish Travellers have some of the attributes of an ethnic group’. This ambiguity was also evident in the Department of the Environment's Review of Policies affecting Travellers (Paris et al., Reference Paris, Maginn and Gray1995). This review identified the ‘difficulty if not impossibility’ of accepting Irish Traveller ethnicity (1995: 18). As the legislation approached, however, Government accepted the arguments in support of Traveller ethnicity. The Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 was broadly similar to the British Race Relations Act (1976) with the one significant difference that it included Irish Travellers as a named group in the legislation.

Once Traveller ethnicity was established, reformism took on a new significance in the context of the GFA. Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act (1998) and the Promoting Social Inclusion (PSI) Working Group on Travellers both marked a movement towards the mainstreaming of Traveller equality issues as part of broader reforms. Travellers are also specifically named as a part of – and integrated into the structures of – the Northern Ireland Executive Race Equality Strategy – the ‘cross-departmental strategy to tackle racial inequalities’ (OFMDFM, 2005a). Within these structures there is a Travellers Thematic Subgroup which reports to the Race Forum and is tasked with overseeing the implementation of the Response to the Recommendations in the Promoting Social Inclusion (PSI) Working Group Report on Travellers (OFMDFM, 2003). In this context, therefore, there can be no doubting the success of formally mainstreaming Traveller equality issues – particularly with the burgeoning race equality infrastructure.

Yet none of this activity has delivered much in terms of justice or equality for Travellers. The resourcing of the Traveller Support Movement remains fragile. Even recent advances in legal protection from discrimination have not been sacrosanct in the context of a revived state anti-Travellerism. For example, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal decision in McDonagh v. Hamilton Thom (NICA 3, 17 January 2007) re-opened the whole issue of Traveller ethnicity and racial discrimination. This decision found that a hotel could ban ‘Traveller functions’ because the decision was made on ‘safety grounds’ (O'Connell, Reference O'Connell2007). As Rory O'Connell argues:

Moreover, while negative sanctions for anti-Traveller discrimination appear under serious threat, state policy towards more positive equality proofing has also failed Travellers. The most disappointing example of this in action is the operation of Section 75 (ECNI, 2007). Of course, it appears radically reformist to have every government policy potentially subject to an impact assessment in terms of the effect it will have on Travellers. Such a mechanism would have been unthinkable before the GFA. However, the evidence to support the conclusion reached that a policy will not require an equality impact assessment (EQIA) – never mind identify any potential impacts on Travellers – is often not listed. Of those ‘screened in’ for EQIA, a relative few include a reference to Travellers in the assessment of impacts for the race category, with even less of these having a positive reference. Most disturbingly, on the one occasion that this mechanism actually ‘worked’ – when the impact assessment of the criminalisation of trespass was made and found to disadvantage Travellers – the state simply went ahead and made the anti-Traveller intervention anyway (DSD, 2004). The Equality Commission review of the effectiveness of Section 75 does not even mention Travellers (ECNI, 2007). Thus the parallels with the south are striking. Reformism has generated a burgeoning Traveller-support infrastructure such as the Forum for the Education of Travellers’ Children in the education sector. But this new infrastructure is increasingly exclusive of Travellers and the Traveller Support Movement and it has failed to mediate other anti-Traveller measures taken by the state. Most importantly, as in the Republic of Ireland, there is little evidence of equality being delivered in terms of outcomes.