Travelling community assists with Ireland's overseas aid effort

A new initiative in Ballyfermot looks to give Travellers a voice on overseas development issues, drawing on their experiences of inequality in Ireland. By Colin Murphy.

Anne Garvey has a trick she uses to show her classes how the world's riches are divided. She uses chairs to represent each continent’s resources, and then divides the class amongst them to represent population. North America ends up with two students stretched across a row of chairs; Africa is one chair with three people trying to balance on it.

The groups she does this with are always immediately struck by the visible disparity. But when Garvey tried this exercise with a group of women involved in the Ballyfermot Travellers Action Project recently, there was little response. "They already accepted that the world’s resources were very unequally divided," she says. "It didn’t surprise them."

The women are doing an adult education course, and as part of it Garvey leads a class on development education, focussing on issues of "global justice", human rights and poverty. The subject typically focuses on poor countries, but Garvey's initial attempts to discuss overseas aid with the women met with a guarded response.

"Why are we sending people over to the developing world to build houses, and sink wells, and provide electricity, when we don’t have those in Labre Park?" she was asked.

Labre Park, in Ballyfermot, is where a number of the women live and is the oldest halting site in the state. The site is visible evidence of the tensions running through the Travelling community; one side of it, Kylemore Grove, is a cul-de-sac of tidy bungalows; on the other side, the houses and trailers gradually give way to burned-out homes. Yet there is fierce pride and a strong sense of community amongst many of those living in Labre. During the worst of the snow this winter, for example, the residents took to helping to free cars stuck at a difficult spot on the road past the site.

Despite the initial scepticism in the group, Garvey persisted, and found that it was those same issues – houses, water, electricity – that became key. Unlike most Irish people, the Traveller women didn't take these for granted, and could easily see how they were connected to poverty in poorer countries.

One of the group, though, was already well versed in issues of poverty in the developing world. Margaret Anne O'Brien had been fundraising for aid projects in Ethiopia for almost a decade. In the last couple of years, her contributions have funded a new floor for the local school, and helped to build homes for eight families. In a decade of fundraising, for a variety of charities, she has raised over €25,000. By the end of this year, she hopes to pass €30,000.

"People say to me, 'what about your own country?' I’ve done it for charities here as well, I tell them. It’s good to share it around. People are happy with that." In a single pub, she can raise as much as €400. "You get a good sense of achievement out of it," she says.

Fundraising was all very well, but O'Brien wanted to see where her money was going. That was easy with the Irish-based charities, but trickier with Ethiopia. An initial plan to visit the project there, seven years ago, fell through. And then O'Brien joined the adult education group in Ballyfermot. Garvey found that the adult education philosophy of of "action learning" was ideally suited to the women there. "They don’t like sitting in the classroom for long periods; they learn more from action and activities."

Garvey decided that the ideal way for the group to learn about life in poorer countries would be to visit one. At around the same time, someone else had a similar idea; Fr. Stephen Monaghan, a former parish priest with the Travelling community, had since become involved in missionary work, and was looking for a way to involve Travellers in his work. He’d already recruited Margaret Anne O’Brien to fundraise, and when she said the Ballyfermot group were interested in travelling, he determined to organise the trip.

That was six months ago. Since then, the group have focussed on preparations; learning, fundraising, and getting dreaded vaccinations and anti-malarial prescriptions. This week, they finally leave for Ethiopia.

They are, as far as they know, the first representatives of Ireland's Travelling community to visit aid projects in Africa. They will spend ten days in Ethiopia, and will visit a women's group in a leprosy project set up originally by an Irish sister in Jimna before travelling to Ambo in central Ethiopia, where Margaret Anne O’Brien’s money has helped with the building of a school and funded a feeding programme for poor children.

"I’ve been looking forward to this for years," says O'Brien. "The priests used to tell me about how much poverty was out there, and I wanted to do something for the children. Now, I want to go over and see what more we can do for them." For her colleague, Lilly Cash, the trip offers a chance "to see what Ethiopia’s really like, not what the TV says it’s like."

Though she is "expecting it to be heart breaking," she is sceptical of the idea that "they’re supposed to be starving over there" and of the "stigma" that Ethiopia is merely poor, with no indigenous culture or quality of life. O'Brien, too, is sensitive to the issue of stigma. "There’s racism against Travellers all over," she says. “If one Traveller does something, all Travellers get blamed for it...Africans get classed the same as Travellers. But they’re human just like us. No one should condemn anyone."

The next stage for the group, after the trip, is to take their experiences to other community groups, and into classrooms. They plan to do workshops and talks on their visit to Ethiopia, drawing on their own experiences as Travellers in Ireland to illuminate them.

For Anne Garvey, this is the most radical aspect of the project. "There’s a colonial or superior attitude in a lot of charity, without people even being aware of it – the idea that it’s all about 'poor people' who need to be 'helped'...Traditionally, aid is seen as rescuing people who are drowning. But what needs to be asked is, why are people falling into the river? We need to hear the voices of marginalised groups themselves. Having a Traveller voice on development issues could help to give us that."

In the meantime, though, the group has more immediate things to worry about, like packing. Margaret Anne O’Brien has a sack of football kits that she has to make room for. Lilly Cash, meanwhile, has a more exotic dilemma. We meet on the occasion of the group’s pre-departure evening out, and Cash is dressed to kill, teetering on an audacious pair of stilettos. "Can I bring my heels?" she says. Fr. Monaghan seeks to reassure her. "They’ll be no use to you in Ethiopia."

"Ah, there's always use in a pair of heels," says Cash.

The Ballyfermot Travellers Action Project is based in the Civic Centre on Ballyfermot Road in Dublin 10. They can be contacted via phone on (01) 6264166 and via email at btap@eircom.net.