The Travellers: Ireland’s Ethnic Minority :: Essays Papers

The Travellers Irelands Ethnic MinorityWho are the Travellers?The Travellers, a nonage community indigenous to Ireland, have existed on the margins of Irish society for centuries. They allocate common descent, and have distinct cultural practices - early marriage, desire to be mobile, a tradition of self-employment, and so on. They have distinct rituals of death and cleansing, and a language they only speak among their own. Travellers are not overtly certified of a sense of group history. Concern with ancestry is an obsession of those who place permanence of place. Rather, the individual is defined by his/her place within the affinity network. They live in extended patriarchal families, prefer trailers, tend to nomadism interspersed with cursory house dwelling, and maintain a nomadic mindset even when sett take a house is considered only a stopping place amid journeys, whether the stop lasts 20 days or 20 years thither are an estimated 21,000 Travellers currently living in the Republic of Ireland, over half(a) of whom have no access to toilet facilities, electricity, refuse collection or piped water.In the past they invariably travel conduct, exactly misguided government form _or_ system of government from the 1960s onward ensured that many were persuaded to settle in houses a insurance policy that, in undermining traditional values and lifestyle, is increasingly questioned, if not actively altered. Traditionally, they were coat workers, hawkers, traders in horses and used goods of all description, and provided services where and when there were gaps in the market. This rampart to wage labour and alternative cultural definition of work led to charges of idleness by the uncomprehending. The necessity of living on their wits led to a stereotype of Travellers as shrewd, even cunning, dealers. Having been persuaded to settle in houses, and consequently, having befogged the mobility necessary to their traditional trades, many Travellers today rely on severalize welfare assistance. This could be construed as a sinister government plot, but for the fact that government policy on Travellers has never been well mean enough to effect any successful strategy Ironically, Traveller voice Michael McDonagh believes that Travellers that are the most nomadic are also the most economically successful, and also have far less difficulty with their identity than masses forced into settlement (quoted in Nomadism in Irish Travellers Identity. From Irish Travellers Culture and Ethnicity.Eds. McCann et al. Belfast Institute of Irish Studies, 1994, 95-109). Their position is akin to that of the itinerant of Europe in some respects.