'Go, Move, Shift': the politics of anti-Traveller racism
Patrick Flynn
Mary Joyce was living at the side of the road
No halting place and no fixed abode.
The vigilantes came to the Darndale site
And they shot her son in the middle of the night.
You better get born in some place else.
Move along, get along, move along, get along, go, move, shift.
—Verse added by Christy Moore to ‘Go, move, shift’, originally written by Ewan McColl.
Introduction: The politics of Rahoonery
Galway City in August 1969 was the arena for one of the most notorious incidents of anti-Traveller violence in the history of independent Ireland. Armed with hurls and cudgels, local residents and farmers in Rahoon in the west of the city - the area was then more rural than the working-class suburb it is today - attempted to drive Traveller families from a serviced halting site constructed by Galway Corporation near the local cemetery, while there were violent protests at flats in the area where Travellers were temporarily housed. The Gardaí did little or nothing to quell the assaults, which was not unusual or remarkable given the attitudes of the Irish state towards Travellers. Tellingly, the violence was so pronounced that they gifted the English language a word – Rahoonery – referring to the violently anti-Traveller sentiment and action the attacks typified.
The attacks took place as the Battle of the Bogside was unfolding in Derry, with residents of the working-class Catholic area repelling repeated attacks by loyalists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Observers were not slow in drawing comparisons between the treatment of Catholics in the north and the treatment of Travellers in Galway, alongside international examples of racial intolerance. An Ennis-based Traveller activist commented on anti-Traveller incidents in Rahoon that ‘the Irishman decries segregation in Alabama, Rhodesia and the north, but condones them at home’. Later intimidation of Annie Furey, a Traveller who moved to the nearby Shantalla area in 1970, attracted the attention of Britain’s Observer and Guardian newspapers, highlighting the threats faced by Travellers in the city internationally. Not unrelatedly, Galway Corporation’s discriminatory attitude towards Travellers grew worse in the 1960s, as it attempted to force the community to camp outside city boundaries, while numerous applications from Traveller families for housing were left outstanding.[1]
The violence typified by Rahoonery was not exclusive to Galway and continued on for decades afterwards. Linking recent anti-migrant violence with the history of anti-Traveller violence in Ireland, playwright and Human Rights Commissioner Rosaleen McDonagh has written that “Knackers out” was a chant:
“repeated by many in many different towns and villages throughout this country. We were pelted with stones and other missiles by residents who didn’t want Travellers in their area. The anti-Traveller march by men in balaclavas on the Tallaght bypass left a psychological mark. The violence, the breaking of windows, the terrorising of children, security men hired by the local authorities lifting trailers leaving only emotional debris and havoc in our lives.”[2]
“A waste of valuable resources”
The situation in Galway is worth analysing at length, with its large Traveller population - the largest in Ireland outside Dublin - and long history of anti-Traveller discrimination. However, it should be emphasised that nothing in Galway is atypical of the wider situation nationwide. Over fifty years on from the assaults in Rahoon and Shantalla, Traveller housing in the city remains in a miserable state. The Traveller families, including over 40 children, residing in mobile homes at the Carrowbrowne halting site on the Headford Road live beside a waste-recycling plant in rat-infested conditions, with no play facilities, floors and walls covered in mould, and damp and freezing outhouses and washing and cooking facilities. A group of academics from the University of Galway, who visited the site last year, told the Irish Times: “From the moment of our arrival at the site, the assault on the senses was overwhelming. On descending from the bus, the pungent smell from the adjacent former city dump caused most of us to retch. We wonder how anybody can enjoy, or even eat, their food in Carrowbrowne…The impact on the health and welfare of the residents of Carrowbrowne, most particularly of the growing children, will be obvious to anyone”. Galway City Council has repeatedly failed to live up to its promise to house the Carrowbrowne families.[3]
The conditions at Carrowbrowne, with Travellers living directly beside a waste facility, are no outlier but reflect the national picture. As Nicole McCarthy has noted in these pages previously, Travellers bear the brunt of environmental racism in Ireland: “for Traveller accommodation sites around Dublin, there are eight licensed waste facilities within one kilometre, 17 within two kilometres and 36 within three kilometres!” Needless to say, wealthy settled communities are more likely to be a considerable distance from such facilities.[4]
This shocking neglect is compounded by Rahoonery-esque vigilantism towards those Traveller homes which are constructed, such as the burning of a house earmarked for Travellers in Kiltulla, Co. Galway, in 2020, which left the local Traveller family due to move-in devastated.[5] Elsewhere, in Limerick, a Traveller family was faced with homelessness as locals threatened to burn their house down if they moved in.[6]
The pitiful amounts of money spent on Traveller accommodation by local councils say it all about how Traveller housing is not even an afterthought for many councillors or officials in local government, as Nicole McCarthy and Des Hennelly outline in their previous Rupture article on ecosocialist solutions to Ireland’s housing crisis. Even after the tragic fire in Carrickmines, Co Dublin, in 2014, which left ten members of the Traveller community dead, ‘councils across Ireland have completely failed to provide Traveller-specific housing. Two-thirds of the money allocated for Traveller housing between 2008 and 2013 wasn’t even used.’[7] Galway City Council was one of ten local authorities that spent none of its funding allocated to Traveller accommodation in 2018.[8] Funding for Traveller accommodation and wider supports were amongst the first and deepest targets of the austerity policies imposed by the Irish government after 2008. As the Socialist Party’s Manus Lenihan noted in a damning article in 2015 on the reaction of the political establishment to the Carrickmines fire: 'There was a 40% cut to local traveller organisations from 2008 to 2013. Education support was cut by 85%. Traveller inter-agency groups were cut entirely. The accommodation budget was €70 million in 2007 and by 2013 it was €3 million.'[9]
When one reviews the public utterances of Galway City councillors – a practice not good for one’s blood pressure or intellectual life at the best of times, given the tawdry standard of debate on the council - the opposition to Traveller housing that has contributed to this shocking neglect is clear. Galway City East councillor Noel Larkin, a right-wing independent, claimed in a letter to the Galway City Tribune in 2019 that “Travellers are now being given every opportunity to be housed and integrated into society, but some choose to reject these opportunities and instead choose a life associated with a culture which may not blend itself with the settled community way of living". Bizarrely he also called “on all Traveller support groups to… apologise to the settled community for branding them all as racists”.[10]
Larkin’s comments came back to haunt him the following year when Galway City East Social Democrat councillor Owen Hanley withdrew from a pact to make Larkin Mayor of Galway after the Galway Traveller Movement, Galway Anti-Racism Network, and the local branch of People Before Profit organised a protest highlighting his past comments. As Dara Bradley, the Tribune’s usually caustic observer of events at Galway City Hall, noted, the events proved that “ordinary citizens taking a stand can change outcomes”– though the fact that it took a protest for Hanley and Labour, Green and independent councillors to withdraw support from Larkin showed how normalised such rhetoric is at local government level in Ireland.[11]
This was no aberration; early last year, another councillor in Galway City East, Fianna Fáil’s Michael Crowe, objected to the City Council accommodating a local Traveller family in a house it bought, claiming Travellers moving into settled communities leads to “confrontation and general uneasiness”. Crowe apologised after the Galway Traveller Movement condemned his comments, and party leader and then Taoiseach Micheál Martin distanced themselves from them. However, these remarks by councillors in Galway typify the rhetoric in opposition to Traveller housing common from government parties and right-wing independents nationwide, including prominent figures.[12]
Indicative is current Fine Gael junior minister Josepha Madigan’s opposition, in a 2014 leaflet distributed in her Dublin Rathdown constituency, to a local Traveller housing site which she declared “a waste of valuable resources”. Madigan was a Councillor for the Stillorgan ward on Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, a ward adjoining the one in which Carrickmines is located. Later defending the comments after the fire, Madigan opined of the construction of halting sites that "Some people are of the opinion that there might be more crime, that there might be anti-social behaviour".[13]
“In Britain”
Rhetoric from politicians in opposition to Traveller housing is also common in Britain, where a large Irish Traveller community exists - and not just among Tories. In April 2021, Charlotte Nichols, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, had a leaflet distributed in her Cheshire community describing Traveller camps as ‘incursions’, only apologising after the leaflet went viral on Twitter - and after initially bizarrely claiming she was not familiar with the meaning of the word incursion.[14] Partly prompted by disgust at this rhetoric, the Labour Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) group changed its name to GRT Socialists. Its founder, a Romany activist Luke Smith, emphasised the pernicious real-life effects of the sentiments expressed in the leaflet in an interview with the revolutionary socialist group RS21, noting that local politicians spread tropes like ‘unauthorised encampments produce rubbish’, while their local authorities ‘refuse to provide bins to Gypsies and Travellers in their constituencies, even if they’re just roaming through… They don’t want to talk about the poor access to water on a lot of sites, or the fact that they put sites on old rubbish disposal tips.’[15] It’s a description the residents at Carrowbrowne would immediately recognise, and it underlines how widespread environmental racism against Travellers, Gypsies, and Roma is.”
The limits of ‘consultation’
While the watchcries du jour of fascism in Ireland are that we need to ‘look after our own’ and ‘house the Irish first’, the irony is that Travellers - a group quintessentially ‘our own’, with roots in Ireland dating back centuries - have faced the brunt of racism, violence and discrimination in housing, in a way that has influenced the intimidation and harassment of refugees and migrants and protests against refugee accommodation. As McDonagh notes in her piece quoted above, so much of the current anti-migrant violence in Ireland – instanced by the destruction of a homeless camp in Dublin in February by thugs with dogs and baseball bats, international students being attacked and racially abused by groups of teens, and a building in Dublin set on fire after a false rumour was circulated that it would be used to house refugees and migrants[16] – is identical and was presaged by the bigotry and violence faced by Travellers in Ireland.
It is crucial that socialists and anti-racist activists make explicit this link, build solidarity with Travellers, migrants, and other oppressed groups, and continually highlight anti-Traveller bigotry alongside anti-migrant racism. The Presidential candidate Peter Casey, who gained 20% of the vote in 2018 on a campaign built upon anti-Traveller rhetoric, is illustrative here; while Casey, himself did not become a long-term actor on Ireland’s political stage, the late and deeply missed socialist writer and People Before Profit activist John Molyneux presciently warned that it is likely that other:
‘politicians will draw from this experience the conclusion that there are rich seams out there just waiting to be mined. Consequently, the left faces a serious challenge here. We have been warned; we must be vigilant; we must take on anti-Travellerism and dismantle it; we must ensure this nasty episode is not repeated.’[17]
It’s a warning that speaks not only to anti-Traveller discrimination but also attempts by the far-right to gain a foothold in the political sphere on the back of attempts to exploit anti-migrant sentiment.
There are other parallels between anti-Traveller racism and the recent anti-migrant protests. Disturbingly, even after the Carrickmines tragedy, grieving families were denied entry into a local pub, while residents blocked a site that was chosen to accommodate the survivors, prompting a meeting between the residents and council officials. In response to the blockade, Labour councillor Lettie McCarthy called for “common sense and calm” to be shown “on both sides”, while Taoiseach Enda Kenny declared that “consultation and conversation with local communities is very important.”[18]
This crass ‘both-sides-ism’ illustrates the limits of "consultation" in averting such opposition, whether those being opposed are Travellers or migrants. There is no doubt the government has blundered massively in how it has engaged with local communities on the allocation of direct provision centres - a cruel, dehumanising system which must be abolished without delay - and that this has played into the hands of the far-right, in manipulating genuine grievances about the under-resourcing and neglect of local communities into anti-immigrant agitation. However, consultation is not a panacea that will cause these protests to disappear, no more than it did for the anti-Traveller protests - and suggesting otherwise misunderstands their nature.
When protestors claim that Travellers moving in nearby will cause an increase in crime, or spread baseless lies that refugees are to blame for sexual assaults locally - as happened recently at a Tallaght protest - it is clear these protests are not motivated by concerns about consultation or local resources and amenities, but by the mere presence of ethnic minorities. In circumstances where local protestors or residents associations mobilise in bigoted ways, socialists must stand unequivocally in solidarity with Travellers and refugees and their right to safe, culturally appropriate public housing - as local activists in Rahoon, including members of Militant, did during a later incident of Rahoonery in the eponymous area in 1986, building solidarity locally against visceral opposition from some local residents, and condemning anti-Traveller violence.[19]
Conclusion
As John Molyneux warned us, socialists cannot be complacent about the existence of anti-Traveller racism across society. We demand an end to state racism against the Traveller community in housing, employment and education. This is true of both states in Ireland; as the north’s Equality Commission highlighted in 2018; ‘persistent inequalities have continued to be periodically documented over the last twenty or more years, and the government in Stormont has done little to alleviate this’.[20] We call for the abolition of laws which criminalise Traveller culture and nomadism, seeking to reverse the disastrous legacy of assimilation implemented by the Irish state in the wake of the 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy. While the state has given some recognition to Traveller ethnicity, it has steadfastly refused to apologise for its historic oppression of the Traveller community; we demand real action here, not just hollow rhetoric.[21] The state’s housing policy must take this into account; as Nicole McCarthy and Des Hennelly have argued in these pages previously, “the material and cultural needs of the Traveller community must be planned for as well, including the importance of horse ownership and space for larger families”.[22] As ecosocialists, we must continually highlight the importance of Traveller-specific accommodation as part of our wider programme for public housing on public land, while emphasising the environmental racism which Travellers across the country experience every day.
Article originally published in Issue 10 of Rupture Magazine. Subscribe or purchase previous issues here.
Notes
1. Gerard Madden, ‘Responses in the West of Ireland to civil rights protest in Northern Ireland, 1968 - 1972’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 41, no. 159 (2017), pp. 72-74.
2. Rosaleen McDonagh, ‘To Travellers, These Mobs are Horribly Familiar’, Dublin Inquirer, February 22, 2023, https://www.dublininquirer.com/2023/02/22/rosaleen-to-travellers-these-mobs-are-horribly-familiar?fbclid=IwAR1dqgcOv5pzp8ZIN5pQ-NAvFAB8HdBSwznvuD0OasdH7ZqCe3LbX228ICA, accessed 21 March 2023.
3. Kitty Holland, ‘Travellers feel they have been “left to die” on rat infested site’, Irish Times, 11 February 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/travellers-feel-they-have-been-left-to-die-on-rat-infested-site-1.3788718, accessed 21 March 2023; letters to the editor, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2022/10/03/carrowbrowne-temporary-halting-site/, accessed 22 March 2023.
4. Nicole McCarthy, ‘Down In The Dumps’, Rupture, issue 2 (Winter 2020).
5. Eavan Murray, ‘Traveller family “devastated” after suspected attack’, Irish Independent, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/traveller-family-devastated-after-suspected-arson-attack-on-house-39493951.html, accessed 19 March 2023.
6. Nicole McCarthy and Des Hennelly, ‘Green gaffs for all’, Rupture, issue 6, https://rupture.ie/articles/green-gaffs-for-all, accessed 19 March 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Cónal Thomas, ‘10 local authorities failed to draw down funding for Traveller accommodation last year’, thejournal.ie, 1 February 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/ten-local-authorities-spent-nothing-on-traveller-accommodation-last-year-new-figures-show-4503701-Feb2019/, accessed 16 March 2023.
9. Manus Lenihan, ‘Carrickmines tragedy and the legacy of anti-Traveller racism’, Socialist Party, 19 October 2015, ‘https://www.socialistparty.ie/2015/10/carrickmines-tragedy-and-the-fight-against-anti-traveller-racism/, accessed 20 March 2023.
10. Galway City Tribune, 9 March 2019.
11. Dara Bradley, ‘Larkin Mayoral U-Turn-Travellers have last laugh’, 3 July 2020, https://connachttribune.ie/larkin-mayoral-u-turn-travellers-have-last-laugh/, accessed 14 March 2023.
12. Press Association, ‘”I was wrong”: Fianna Fáil councillor apologizes for comments regarding Travellers’, thejournal.ie, 29 September, 2022, https://www.thejournal.ie/michael-crowe-galway-councillor-traveller-5880138-Sep2022/, accessed 14 March 2023.
13. Josepha Madigan, ‘Why I’m standing over my Traveller site views’, Irish Independent, 5 December 2015, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/josepha-madigan-why-im-standing-over-my-traveller-site-views-34262443.html, accessed 14 March 2023; Lenihan, ‘Carrickmines tragedy’, https://www.socialistparty.ie/2015/10/carrickmines-tragedy-and-the-fight-against-anti-traveller-racism/
14. Ben Quinn, ‘Labour to destroy local election leaflet carrying anti-Travellers pledge’, The Guardian, 2 April 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/02/labour-destroy-local-election-leaflet-anti-travellers-pledge, accessed 18 March 2023.
15. Charlotte Powell, ‘How the Police Bill targets Gypsies, Roma and Travellers’, RS21, 10 May 2021, https://www.rs21.org.uk/2021/05/10/how-the-police-bill-targets-gypsies-roma-and-travellers/, 21 March 2023.
16. Internationalist Standpoint, ‘The anti-refugee protests in Ireland and the response of the left: Interview with Diarmuid Flood’, 10 March 2023, https://www.internationaliststandpoint.org/the-anti-refugee-protests-in-ireland-and-the-response-of-the-left-interview-with-diarmuid-flood/, accessed 22 March 2023.
17. John Molyneux, ‘The resistable rise of Peter Casey’, Rebel, 29 October 2018, http://www.rebelnews.ie/2018/10/29/the-rise-of-casey-and-anti-travellerism/, accessed 22 March 2023.
18. Lenihan, ‘Carrickmines tragedy’, https://www.socialistparty.ie/2015/10/carrickmines-tragedy-and-the-fight-against-anti-traveller-racism/, accessed 22 March 2023
19. RTÉ Archives, ‘Traveller row continues: Broadcast 1 October 1986’, https://www.rte.ie/archives/collections/news/21225768-traveller-row-continues/, accessed 22 March 2023.
20. Rebel, ‘Home truths: Stormont’s Institutional Racism’, Rebel, 6 August 2020, http://www.rebelnews.ie/2020/08/06/stormonts-institutional-racism/, accessed 22 March 2023.
21. Dave Lordan and Peadar O’Grady, ‘Irish Travellers and anti-Traveller racism’, Irish Marxist Review, 2019, pp. 30-37.
22. McCarthy and Hennelly, ‘Green Gaffs for all’, https://rupture.ie/articles/green-gaffs-for-all