Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life by Sharon Bohn Gmelch & George Gmelch

Author:Sharon Bohn Gmelch & George Gmelch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Residents objected to camps like this one located next to a public housing estate in Dublin in 1971 for a host of reasons, both real and exaggerated: unsightliness, sanitation, wandering animals, noise, the nuisance of frequent requests for water, and more.

For entertainment, Mary Browne poses her young son James with a cigarette and Guinness in their Holylands hut, 1972.

Take boxing. It’s been great for Travellers. Some parents start kids that size [indicates three feet high] boxing. You’ll see very young kids going down to the gym. Boxing takes skill and links in with the macho part of Traveller culture. It’s been good because when you box, you learn to control the violence. Boxing was big among Travellers even when I arrived in Ennis in ’74, and a lot of Travellers have been very successful at it, like Francis Barrett being in the Olympics.

This reminds me of a story. On a site up in Hillside, there’re these skips [bins] for rubbish. Some of the Travellers would put their rubbish into the skip and some would throw it on the ground beside the skip, so there was always a bit of a problem. After Frank [Francis Barrett] came back from the Olympics, I was talking to this buffer and he was saying to me, “They ought to make Francis Barrett a community worker up there.” His idea was that Frank would have respect and that he’d be able to say to people, “Look, sort that out.” I tried to explain to him, “In reality what would happen is that Frank would say to someone, ‘Look, you been putting that rubbish over there. You need to put it into the skip.’ And they’d say, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, Frank?’” It didn’t matter that Frank was an Olympic champion, because when he came home a couple of weeks later, someone attacked him and his father with a knife. A couple of Travellers cut him up. People have this idea that certain Travellers can just lay down the law, but that’s not true. Even if you’re strong and tough, the other guy will get four guys and come after you.

I’ve written a lot of songs for young Travellers, and Travellers are writing their own songs. Again, it’s part of that confidence; “We can do it.” There’s a girl here, Bridget Mongan; she has a song called “The Everlasting Rose.” She wrote a lot of it on her own. There was a small room in the community center up in Ballybane for music, and there were a lot of kids in it playing and talking. Some African kids would be there, too. One day Bridget came up to me and said, “I have this song. It’s called ‘The Everlasting Rose.’” I looked up and said, “There isn’t any such thing as an everlasting rose.” She said, “No, it’s about my grandmother.” And she sang the first part of it, and I realized, “This is very nice.” Then, in the bedlam of it all, she wasn’t able to write anymore.

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