'Insubordinate Irish'

Travellers in the text

Michael O' hAodha

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This book traces a number of common themes relating to the representation of Irish Travellers in Irish popular tradition and how these themes have impacted on Ireland's collective imagination.

1 Irish Travellers and the nineteenth century ‘Others’

Irish Travellers are a minority who have lived on the margins of mainstream Irish society for many centuries. Many contemporary sources refer to the Irish Travellers as an ethnic group, and they are recognised as such in Britain, although not in Ireland. It is estimated that there are at least 36,000 Travellers living in the Republic of Ireland with a further 6,000 in Northern Ireland. There are also significant communities of Travellers who claim Irish descent living in Britain and the United States. They are distinct from the surrounding population due to a range of differing cultural attributes. These include family structure, language, employment patterns and a traditional preference for nomadism or mobility as is inherent in the very ascription they attach to their community. For the past few centuries, these attributes have ensured the renewal of the Traveller community and their way of life from one generation to the next. It has also aided the cohesiveness and survival of this marginal community and its culture in the face of what in recent decades, at least, has frequently been a hostile majority or settled community.

While it is sometimes claimed that Travellers have remained invisible within the official historical record in Ireland, this is not entirely the case. References in the Irish language, as recorded in the oral history tradition in particular, refer to fir siúil (travelling men, wanderers, lit: ‘walking men’) and mná siúil (travelling women). It is clear that the people alluded to in these references form a large amalgam of groups and individuals, all of whom are most likely descendants of a range of peripatetic and occupational groups. That some of these people were musicians, travelling poets, entertainers and healers is clear as is the fact that many others were tradespeople of different types including travelling tinsmiths, metalworkers, horse dealers, fairground entertainers and farm workers of different types. As with many in the settled population many Traveller families supplemented one trade with another and combined their occupation with hawking or occasional begging. The preference for travelling alone or as part of larger and kin-related family groups varied depending on the travel routes these people used. Until recent decades, many of these Travellers were referred to as ‘tinkers’, but today they are more commonly referred to as Travellers.

History tells us that a large and diverse number of often peripatetic occupational groups and cultures existed in Ireland prior to the Tudor re-conquest of the sixteenth century and that some of these cultural minorities survived for centuries after the death of the Gaelic order.¹ The antecedents of the group are an amalgam of a range of differing cultural groups, the history of which has been lost for the most part. The history of these peripatetic cultures in both the pre-Gaelic and post-Gaelic eras is still the object of some conjecture and requires future additional research. One element which united each of these diverse travelling peoples and cultures was the fact that they were nomadic for all or part of the year. This preference for nomadism or a peripatetic life has always functioned as a distinctive trait of the Irish Travellers and set them apart from the settled community.

This study is an attempt to understand the contradictory and complex images of the Irish Travellers as constructed within both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural impulses and as viewed by both the settled and travelling populations. Essential to this study, therefore, are the descriptions of Travellers provided in oral and (later) written form during the early 1950s as part of the Irish Folklore Commission’s cultural reclamation project. While the bulk of these descriptions were provided to the archive by respondents from the settled community they reflect Irish constructions of Irish people vis-à-vis the self and Other and as relating to the paradigm that was an ‘outsider’ group at this critical juncture of Irish cultural development and historical self-definition – i.e. the decades immediately subsequent to Irish independence (1922).

The primary source material for this study is the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission, a body of material which includes a Questionnaire on Tinkers that was circulated to members of the settled community in 1950. Central to the discussion in this volume is the idea that the representation of Travellers, i.e. their perceived identity as incorporated in the general attitudes expressed by the Irish people in the Irish Folklore Commission archives, translated Travellers into a dramatic spectacle of cultural Otherness, one which was assimilated into the originary development of the Nationalist imaginary in Ireland, and the very project of Irish identity itself. Travellers are described using a series of popular stereotypes as implicated in discourse. These discursive strategies inculcated an array of suspicions and superstitions. That this array of often reductionist stereotypes have been constantly re-articulated in Ireland over the course of many centuries is acknowledged by most thinkers and writers on this subject. More worrying still is the fact that such labelling and stereotype has in an increasingly globalised and media-saturated modern era frequently assumed the status of some form of objective ‘truth’ regarding who Travellers are, where they originated and what the essential tenets of their culture comprise. That the reductionist aspects of this discourse sometimes functioned to justify Travellers’ exclusion from ‘regular’ or ‘mainstream’ society is the most serious aspect of this ‘regime of truth’.

It has also been the case in recent decades that any time the Traveller ‘question’ has been discussed publicly, the discussion has almost inevitably been premised on or peppered with the repetition of long-established and outmoded half-truths and fallacies, many of which have been used to support the ‘majority’ view that the Traveller issue has only one ‘solution’ – i.e. that Travellers and their nomadic and ‘separate’ culture are an apparent anachronism in the modern nation-state and it should therefore be outlawed. Following on from this is the attendant view that it is necessary for Travellers to be assimilated as has happened with so many other cultural minorities before them in this post-Enlightenment era. Currently, this minority versus majority/nation-state ‘conflict’ or struggle takes place in the domains of discourse and ideology.

One of the most powerful forces the modern nation-state has had in the course of its ‘debates’ with the Traveller community is the power of definition, the power of the written word in particular. This arena is one which has held particular significance in recent years given the claims for ethnic status that have been pursued by some Traveller activists in Ireland. Until very recent decades, Traveller culture was frequently a non-literate one, a post-colonial reality which meant that the manner whereby their culture was defined was more often than not beyond the control of Travellers themselves. This sees Travellers and other similar (and numerically small) minorities at an enormous disadvantage when attempting to negotiate their struggle for identity and recognition in a society which – in the case of Ireland – is increasingly state-oriented and where media perception and the presentation/manipulation of ‘image’ is deemed paramount.

The bitter reality is that Irish Travellers have scarcely been able to exercise any influence on the way in which their identity has been constructed over the past century or so, whether in Ireland or amongst the significant populations of Irish Travellers who have formed large Irish diasporas in countries such as Britain and the US. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that the Traveller image or ‘truth’, as defined by non-Travellers, has become institutionalised in Ireland and other countries in much the same way that the image of the Roma (Gypsy) people, part-negative and part-exoticist, also became institutionalised within Western tradition. It can be argued that the institutionalisation of representation, image or stereotype in relation to marginalised and ‘outsider’ minorities such as Travellers and Roma has become so engrained within the Western cultural heritage that it has become reified and irrefutably ‘fixed’ within the public imaginary. Debates about cultural legitimacy aside, this ossification of ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ presages that the survival of the Irish Traveller minority and their culture is heavily dependent not only on the ability of the Travelling community to resist the forces of assimilation and acculturation to the majority society, but is also largely dependent on the attitudes and beliefs of the majority towards that community and culture. Hence the imperative to examine the attitudes (both official and non-official) of the non-Traveller majority towards the minority culture in their midst, the evolution of these attitudes over time and the counter-hegemonic views and approaches of the Traveller minority who move between both the ‘settled’ and ‘non-Traveller’ cultures and inhabit an area of knowledge or discourse that was often located somewhere in between.

Recent decades have seen debates in Ireland, and indeed Europe, concerning Traveller (and Roma) cultural legitimacy coalesce around one primary theme, i.e. the question of origins. With respect to Irish Travellers’ origins, this debate is more often than not a ‘red herring’; it is often a diversion from the real issues or sources of contention at hand given that Irish historical sources, particularly those recorded in the English language, exhibit a paucity of evidence concerning the role and nature of peripatetic groups or peoples in Ireland. With Ireland nominally a colonial outpost of Britain for eight centuries, English made little distinction between occupational Traveller groups and other ‘wandering Irish’. Irish Travellers do not claim any one standard theory as to their historical origins. Opinions on this issue vary amongst Travellers just as they do amongst the ‘settled’ community. The modern nation-state has driven a process whereby cultural legitimacy has now often been predicated on historical origins, however, and the question of Traveller origins and cultural development thereafter have assumed a more prominent role in debates about Traveller rights and debates relating to Traveller/settled relations over recent decades. Commentators in both the Travelling and settled communities ascribe Traveller origins to a number of possibilities, some of which may have operated either individually or in tandem with one another. On the overall level, these theories of origin can be divided into three primary schools of thought. One strand of opinion considers Traveller emergence along the following lines. The possibility has been put forward that the Irish Travellers are the descendants of:

1   Peasants evicted from the land by changed economic conditions, socio-economic discord or famine.

2   Peasants who were driven into a nomadic existence because of a sort of social disgrace or ignominy.

3   Native chiefs stripped of their lands and dispossessed by English colonial policies during various centuries (e.g. the ‘to Hell or to Connaught’ maxim which accompanied Cromwell’s clearance policies, to cite but one possible example) (See Binchy, 1993)

Whether taken individually or together, these three possibilities can be seen to form a school of thought or a ‘theory’ that reflects many contemporary constructions of Travellers in Ireland. This is the view that Travellers have somehow ‘fallen away’ from a previously sedentary or ‘settled’ existence, one where they were neither ‘outsiders’ nor marginalised within Irish society. The likelihood implied here is that the hand of history has deemed them victims of their own human inadequacy or victims of colonial oppression.

The fact that such a derogatory theory reflects the commonplace view in modern Ireland undoubtedly has very serious implications from both the historical and sociological points of view. It is a theory which has also had serious consequences for both the Travelling and settled communities and their interactions with one another. Theorists such as Helleiner (2000) have pointed out that such a hypothesis can serve as a justification for anti-Traveller prejudice or racism in addition to functioning as a catalyst for assimilationist policies as implemented on the part of the Irish State (see McDonagh, 1994). A second proposition places Traveller ethnogenesis at an earlier juncture than the aforementioned ‘drop-out from a previously “settled” existence’ and hypothesises that Travellers are the descendants of pre-historic or pre-Celtic populations, cultural groups who were displaced by successive invasions in Ireland. This position has been posited by a number of historians and writers including McCormick (1907), MacNeill (1919), Puxon (1967) and O’Toole (1972).

More recently again, a combination of the two main ‘schools of thought’ has been put forward in the literature. Binchy (1993) who researched Travellers in both Britain and Ireland during the 1980s, has cited Michael Flynn, a medical doctor who traced the genealogies of several large extended Traveller families in the Irish midlands. His research argues that Traveller origins may be located somewhere between the two main prevailing theses:

I liken the situation to a conveyor belt stretching back into ancient times carrying the traveller population. There would have been a steady trickle of families dropping off and settling in houses while other persons or families would ‘hop onto the conveyor belt’, or drop out from society, or take on some of the former crafts or occupations of the travellers… . (Flynn in Binchy, 1993: 13)

It is noteworthy that this latter hypothesis has gained support amongst Travellers themselves, as recounted in the expanding canon of life histories and autobiographical literature produced by Travellers themselves in recent years. Traveller musician Pecker Dunne sees the Travelling community as a diverse community which is always an amalgam of an already long-extant travelling peoples and smaller numbers of non-Travellers who frequently joined their community through marriage or because they pursued similar economic interests or work patterns.

Where did we come from? I’ve often asked myself that question … Some say that the Travellers left their houses and started travelling. They left old shacks at the side of the road because they couldn’t make a living anymore. People say that it was the landlords and the evictions that were the cause of this. That is only one part of the story though. Some people have always preferred to live their lives on the road. If you go back and read the old stories you will find Travelling people mentioned all the time. When the Gaelic culture was stronger in Ireland travelling was a normal part of the life then and no-one passed any heed to it. Some people travelled for a living and some people preferred to stay in the one place and make their living there. Many poets and healers have always travelled. So too have many musicians like myself. There have always been Travellers in Ireland because some people have always preferred to travel so as to make a living. It’s the same in a lot of other countries too. You go to any country and you’ll find a group of people who preferred to travel to make a living. Look at the Aborigines in Australia, the Red Indians in America, the Romany Gypsies in England. There is no way that all the Travellers in Ireland were the product of eviction and famine. Some of us were but not all of us. The Travellers are in Ireland a long, long time. We have been here for centuries – we sure have! (Dunne and Ó hAodha, 2004: 32)

This latter strand of belief, implying an ethnogenesis as a consequence of a range of historical factors, may be the most likely hypothesis. It is also a view which is increasingly apparent in the growing canon of literature emerging from within the Irish Traveller community itself:

This long-held myth that the Irish Travellers were just ‘potato people’, drop-outs from the Famine. That we were not ‘real’ Travellers at all and that it was right and proper, and necessary even, to force us to ‘settle’ down again. With this in mind I decided to trace the stories of five families, all of whom were closely related to me … The research threw up many interesting facts, some of which would irritate the ‘purists’ whether in the Traveller or settled communities (Warde, 2009: 81)

Whatever the historical reality, it is unlikely that any definitive answer to the question of Traveller origins and the ethnogenesis of this long-established minority will be arrived at in the near future. That significant numbers of Irish peoples and occupational groups lived a nomadic or semi-nomadic life at various junctures of Irish history is now widely accepted. That many of these individuals or kin-related groups ‘took to the road’ at different times and for varying reasons is without question. Whether the latter became part of an already extant Traveller community cannot easily be ascertained.

What is a known fact, however, is that the question of Traveller ‘origins’ played a role in the formation of the Irish imaginary, particularly in the post-colonial period. Exploring the British cultural realm, Nord (2006) has highlighted a similar cultural dynamic whereby traditionally migratory peoples, in this case the British Gypsies, were frequently employed as essentialised literary tropes which encompassed the search for authenticity and the Victorian and colonial obsession with origins. It is also the case that the conventional wisdom in Ireland today tends strongly towards some version of the colonial ‘expulsion’ theory i.e. that Travellers somehow abandoned a previously settled existence and are the remnants of Ireland’s tragedy, the vestiges and relics of our colonial past. Given that group origins, cultural legitimacy and the attendant questions which circumvent such debates have been given so much weight in this, the post-Enlightenment era, the various historical ‘versions’, ‘truths’ and myths of Irish Traveller history still play an important role in determining the nexus of Traveller/settled relations in the present day. The past has consequences; it has consequences for the attitudes and approaches adopted with respect to cultural minorities; it also has consequences for the position which the cultural minorities themselves – in this case the Travellers – occupy within modern Irish society.

The ‘drop-out’ version of Irish Traveller history and origins may hold sway today but this was not always the case. Even in the early 1900s other versions of Irish Traveller history had their place within the Irish collective imaginary and the ‘drop-out’ version of history did not construe the dominant account; there were other more diverse accounts. Alternative renderings of the historical process existed whereby Travellers were not necessarily constructed as the Irish ‘them’ or essentialised out of any ‘real’ historical existence; they were not dislocated from the Irish ‘self’ or ‘othered’ from the outside in. It is on the uncovering of these competing and alternative historical discourses that I focus in this volume.

NOTES

   1 The Flight of the Earls in 1607 is often marked as the date which heralded the end of the Gaelic order in Ireland.

2 The Traveller colonised

The question of group origins as a marker for cultural legitimacy is today often considered a very recent development, a development that can be attributed entirely to modernity. The issues of ethnogenesis, group origins, kin-related heredity and apparent ‘legitimacy’ in both cultural and historic terms were all issues which fascinated intellectuals and scholarly communities in the nineteenth century and earlier, however. In fact such subjects or ‘objects of enquiry’ would actually serve as the backdrop to the very first ‘institutionally-inspired’ studies of Travellers and Gypsies in Western Europe.

A secondary or marginal interest for much of the nineteenth (and indeed, twentieth) century, the study of Traveller and Gypsy communities and their cultures was a very minor concern. In Western Europe the main source of interest for Gypsies and Travellers (the latter to a much lesser extent) in the late 1900s was the Gypsy Lore Society based in Liverpool, England. This Society was a ‘pseudo-scholarly’ amalgam of linguists, artists, folklorists, cultural enthusiasts and hobbyists which had originally been founded in 1888. In their day, they were considered Europe’s leading authorities on Romany Gypsies and other traditionally nomadic groups with a similar social and cultural history.

Amongst the early members of this Society were some of the leading political and cultural figures of that era including Middle Eastern explorer Sir Richard F. Burton, the highly regarded linguist and Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, Archduke Joseph of Austria-Hungary and the artist Augustus John, to name but a few. Irish poet William Butler Yeats was also a member of the Society for a short period, a society whose membe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Irish Travellers and the nineteenth century ‘Others’
• 2 The Traveller colonised
• 3 Irish Travellers and the bardic tradition
• 4 Theoretical perspectives and the Irish context
• 5 Mapping ‘difference’: Irish Travellers and the Questionnaire
• 6 Travellers as countercultural
• 7 Narrative and the Irish imaginary: Contested terrains
• 8 Anti-Traveller prejudice: The narrative within the Irish imaginary
• 9 The counter-tradition and symbolic inversion
• 10 The dichotomy of Self and Other: Some considerations
• Bibliography
• Index