A small table stands inside the front door of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown county council’s office, where residents from Rockville Drive have been negotiating with officials about their blockade of a proposed halting site for people rendered homeless and bereaved by last weekend’s fire in Carrickmines. Upon the table are a candle and a book of condolences for the three men, two women and five children who perished. Copious pages are filled with messages of sympathy.
“I hope you’re OK,” says one. “May youse get the best beds in heaven cousins,” says another. Most messages simply read “rest in peace” or “RIP”, as if their authors were lost for words. A man from Blackrock appears to have struggled to derive something positive from such unspeakable tragedy. “Life changed, not ended,” he wrote.
For a flickering moment, there was hope in the air; hope that life really could change. Maybe this shared sadness was how the settled and the traveller communities could come together at last and build a friendship. Ireland was moved by the anguish of those involved, including two injured children whose mother, father and three siblings had died. President Michael D Higgins expressed the people’s sympathy. The taoiseach decreed that flags were to fly at half mast on state buildings. In Cardiff’s Millennium Park on Sunday evening, players and spectators honoured the dead.
The moment of promise didn’t outlast the candle light. On Sunday, two men whose relatives were among the dead were refused admission to Ollie’s Bar in Dundrum when they arrived for lunch. News of the incident caused barely a ripple of public disquiet. Tales of travellers being turned away from pubs are as intrinsic to Irish life as wet summers. Both are discomfiting and best forgotten.
It took the Rockville Drive residents’ protest to stir public revulsion. There was disgust that orphaned children and their bereft grandparents were shunned in their hour of need. The residents, who have remained shadowy figures because they wish not to be identified, have complained of antisocial behaviour by travellers. Deep down, some of the anger being directed at them by other settled people arises from the dilemma their blockade has created. It has forced the great Irish unmentionable onto the national agenda, again.
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The stand-off between the settled and traveller communities is Ireland’s most intractable divide, and one of the country’s biggest taboos. Few dare speak of it as we tiptoe around the social, cultural and linguistic landmines. The unspoken consensus is that Ireland tried fixing the problem and failed. Now, least said soonest mended.
If the Carrickmines tragedy had not happened, would it even have come to light that 15 local authorities did not use this year’s designated funding for traveller accommodation? Did the money go unspent, in the midst of a national homeless crisis, because officialdom deemed the inevitable not-in-my-backyard outcry more trouble than it was worth?
The strained silence between the traveller and the settled lets bigotry take root. Every unthinking insult, and every deliberate one that goes unchallenged, is another green shoot on the vine that withers. In recent years, Ireland has chosen to turn a blind eye to injustice and splenetic outrage rather than engage in another fruitless blame game. When you live in a culture of casual, everyday prejudice, it is difficult to remain uncontaminated.
Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, a Sinn Fein TD for Donegal North East, is the only Dail member with traveller blood. His mother was born at the side of the road. Her father was a tin smith. Mac Lochlainn says that he has suffered no prejudice in Dail Eireann because of his background, but adds: “One of the most unpopular things you can do as a politician is stand up for travellers.”
Early this year, he was at a Gaelic football match in Buncrana. A woman in front of him shouted invective at one of the players for unsporting behaviour. Her chosen term of abuse was: “You tinker.” Nobody objected, including Mac Lochlainn. “I was at a football match,” he said. “I wanted peace.”
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That incident is a microcosm of a country-wide phenomenon. People pick peace over confrontation. A generation ago, there was a willingness to try to span the gulf between the settled and the traveller. There were heated debates on The Late Late Show while Glenroe, RTE’s Sunday-night rural soap opera, featured a nuanced storyline involving a traveller family. When David Joyce made history by becoming the first traveller to qualify as a barrister, the media gave it blanket coverage.
Now Joyce is a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, there is equality legislation on the statute books, and sportsmen from the travelling community have won Olympic medals for Ireland. Yet popular culture embraces the exploitative My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and the innuendo that all travellers are lazy, lying criminals. Before, society wanted to mend fences. Now, its first resort is to throw up barriers. This Irish state we share is one of mutual suspicion. What happened?
A turning point was the killing in October 2004 by Pádraig Nally, a Co Mayo farmer, of John Ward, a traveller. Nally was so frightened that travellers would break into his home that he spent five hours a day sitting with a shotgun in his shed. When he found Ward at his property, Nally shot him, beat him, retrieved more shotgun cartridges, chased him down a lane and shot him again, this time in the head. The late judge Paul Carney sentenced Nally to six years’ imprisonment for Ward’s manslaughter, remarking: “The is undoubtedly the most socially divisive case I have had to try.”
Nally successfully appealed against the verdict. He was retried, and acquitted. The implicit message was that it is acceptable for a settled person to kill a traveller deliberately, because there is a justifiable fear of travellers. After that, the rule book was torn up.
In 2002, Noel Grealish, then a Progressive Democrat TD, proposed a new law to allow publicans to bar travellers from their premises. When Phil Hogan was the environment minister, he wrote to his constituents imparting the supposedly glad tidings that a named traveller family would not, after all, be housed in the locality. Last year, Josepha Madigan, a Fine Gael councillor in Stillorgan, described plans for a travellers’ halting site as “a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money”.
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If Pavee Point and other traveller organisations set this sort of example, people would be up in arms. Yet the establishment constantly bemoans an alleged lack of leadership in the traveller community, accusing them of failing to keep their members on the straight and narrow.
Some criticism of some travellers is justified, just as some criticism of some settled people is justified. This truism gets obliterated by the absence of a parity of esteem, something that was recognised as a fatal flaw in the Northern Ireland peace process. Last year, an Oireachtas report recommended that travellers’ ethnicity be recognised by law, something the UN and various other organisations have been urging for a long time.
It would be a fitting resolution to the heartbreak and the cruelty of the past week.