Breaking the bias and bigotry

Fergal Keane examines Traveller issues as part of Traveller Focus week

This week, as part of Traveller Focus Week, I found myself on a halting site in Clondalkin. Over the years I have been on a few, almost all of them a study in long-term poverty and deprivation.

Not that the halting sites in Clondalkin are too bad, as halting sites go. The day I was there, to speak to people about the difficulties of getting Traveller children through our education system, it was pouring rain. There were huge puddles everywhere and parents were doing their best to keep very young children inside their mobile homes. It was on the same day as two babies from a nearby halting site were being buried after a fire destroyed their caravan.

On the face of it the place was fairly clean. There was none of the rubbish you sometimes see on sites with big problems, none of the abandoned cars or other junk assembled at some Traveller camps. But according to the people who have been living there for nine years and more, the place is plagued by rats. There is no hot water; showers and toilets are inadequate and washing facilities are poor.

But, speaking to these people about our education system, you find that many of them perform quiet miracles every day, simply by getting their children out to school at all. I have reported from several halting sites and Traveller camps over the years. Sometimes no one will talk to you at all, but for the most part the Travellers I have met have been incredibly hospitable, open and hugely entertaining. One time I remember going to a Traveller camp to report on how they were being harassed by vigilantes into leaving the area. I ended up spending the night on the floor of the caravan, eating sliced pan for tea and watching the Late Late Show. Those people were genuinely afraid of being run out of the only place they could think of to set up home, and were more than willing to share it with strangers.

But in recent times I have noticed a difference, people for the first time want their children to finish off their schooling and get decent jobs. They will tell you that it has been traditional for most Travellers to quit school when they finished primary and not to bother with it after that. That has changed now and almost every parent you speak to wants their children to stay on until they are 17 and to do their Leaving Cert. (The idea of a transition year is something Travelling families can only look on with derision.)

They face two areas of resistance. The first is the absolute refusal of many schools to take in any Travellers at all. The visiting teachers programme run by the Department of Education encounters school principals all over the country who flatly refuse to take in Travellers or else say that they will only take a quota. In Clondalkin, I found that was not an issue at all and all the teachers I spoke to welcomed the many Traveller children they had in their classes. For their part, the pupils I met reported getting no discrimination or harassment over their backgrounds.

The other area is potentially more difficult. Almost every parent will tell you that the single biggest obstacle they face in keeping their children in school is peer pressure from others who have dropped out. One of the biggest insults one Traveller teenager can throw at any other Traveller over 15 is to call him a schoolboy.

Peer pressure seems to me to be a huge problem for the Travelling community as a whole. They are castigated over the involvement of some of their number in crime, but even Travellers will tell you that they feel they cannot report wrongdoing by one of their number to gardaí. People working with Travellers will also tell you that there is another problem, most Travellers will not even report crime when it is committed against themselves, whether by their own community or by outsiders.

Taken to its extreme this allows the huge illegal camps we saw in many parts of the country up until three years ago. They caused huge damage to the whole Traveller community, but no one within that community said stop, with any conviction. In a way, the Michael McDowell legislation which made this type of trespass a criminal offence was the best thing that ever happened to Travellers.

The next best thing that could happen would be that Travellers join the gardaí in numbers. Apparently seven recently applied to join under the campaign to recruit members of ethnic minorities. The more who actually succeed in pulling on the uniform the better for their whole community.

Fergal Keane is a reporter with RTÉ radio's Five Seven Live