It’s easy to be sympathetic when you don’t have to sacrifice or change. It’s also easy to be sympathetic when you know it won’t ever mean admitting you’re wrong.
Ten people died last week in a fire in Dublin. Five adults, five children- two families. As far as I know, two people survived- a boy of 14 and his four year old brother. Their home destroyed, as well as their neighbours’.
And on one level, the way the country reacted was appropriate: with shock and condolences to the families. Our Taoiseach (that’s a Prime Minister) has asked that flags be flown at half mast during the days of their funerals- which, in a small country, feels appropriate. Sympathy has poured out from everywhere. In all the media- the papers, the radio, the TV news- we’ve heard the story of the families destroyed overnight. Of course we have. And I do believe that it’s mostly genuine. Our hearts do go out to those children, their parents, and all the people left behind.
Okay. You see, here’s where things get difficult. More difficult.
The two families were members of the Travelling community. The way that Ireland treats its Traveller citizens is shameful. I’m not going to try and say things like “last acceptable prejudice”- anyone who’s paying attention can tell that plenty of prejudices are acceptable. But there is an exceptional shamelessness to the way that Irish settled people discriminate against Travellers. I’ve heard people who felt like they should couch their racism against other groups in polite language using the most blatant anti-Traveller slurs with no indication that anyone would have a problem with it. In Ireland- that wonderfully inclusive land of equality, or so we’re led to believe- Travellers are them.
I remember that when I lived in my last apartment, people would regularly warn me about the Travellers living up the hill from us. Of course, that wasn’t quite the word they used to describe them. People were concerned for me, of course- don’t you know that they would be causing all sorts of hassle? Don’t I know I should be careful, living close to them?
(I shouldn’t have to point out that nothing ever happened, by the way. Or that even if it did, it wouldn’t matter a damn or make racist generalisations acceptable.)
An aside: I use the term ‘racist’ to describe anti-Traveller prejudice. This might seem odd to people from outside Ireland, given that most Travellers are as pale as I am. However: discrimination against Travellers in Ireland is based on their ethnic origin. Travellers are a distinct ethnic and cultural group. The Settled community have immense power to institutionalise the ways in which we marginalise and discriminate against Travellers. Travellers may be (mostly) white, but in Ireland they sure as hell aren’t White.
Okay. Here’s what I’ve been leading up to.
While we were busy ostentatiously displaying our grief- over people we wouldn’t have given the time of day to if they were alive- we never stopped hating them.
The day after those ten people died, their relatives were turned away from a local bar where they tried to buy lunch.
Some of the comments on the article I just linked to (I’m not going to blank out names, by the way, as they were posted publicly on a far more popular site than this):
To too many people in this country, those two men aren’t people. They’re not individuals. They have no characteristics of their own except one- and that’s a word I’m not going to write here.
It gets worse. A lot worse.
You see, more than one home burned down that night. Fifteen people now need somewhere to live- and emergency accommodation is being made ready for them to move into on Thursday.
I’m trying to think of what would happen if settled Irish people, survivors of a tragedy that had flags flying at half-mast throughout the country, were provided with somewhere to stay. What welcome they would receive from their new neighbours. People who had sighed sadly along to the radio news, shaken their heads when they heard of the two babies who died along with their parents and siblings.
I can’t imagine them blockading the area in protest.
I can’t imagine people reacting like this to hearing about it:
This is not our Last Acceptable Prejudice. Travellers are not the only group of people we treat this way. And it is always unacceptable. But this week, the way that Irish people feel about our Travelling community is on display for us all to see. In a way that most settled Irish people spend our lives ignoring. In a way that I spend most of my life ignoring.
We have normalised our hatred of Travellers to the extent that we clap each other on the back for kicking a grieving family out of our businesses and turning them away from our communities. We act as if everyone born a Traveller is tainted, tar every single one with the same brush, and then act like it’s nothing to do with us when some want nothing to do with settled people. We treat an Irish culture like its people are vermin. We leave people to rot in horrifying living conditions and when those conditions kill them all at once- instead of over years in drastically reduced life expectancies– we pretend to care.
We pretend to care until the moment we are called upon to allow one of them to be in the same space as one of us.
I’m ashamed. And if you’re a settled Irish person, you should be too.
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I had a colleague who moaned about the way they treat their animals being disgusting, moaned about the mess they leave behind, moaned about the rusting wrecks of old vehicles all over the countryside.
I asked him if he was talking about farmers, or travellers. He thought (rightly) that I was trying to make him feel foolish.
Except that farmers adhere to regulations, whereas travelers regularly mistreat horses and dogs
…and so it begins.
Wow. Sad to see stuff like this, and unfortunately, stuff like it happens everywhere, with varying degrees of occlusion. In the US, blatant prejudice against African Americans has gone out of style, so it’s all encoded, but prejudice against people who read as Hispanic or Middle Eastern is extremely overt. We seem to think as long as you don’t say the N-Word, nothing you say can be racist. What kind of efforts are there to change the public image of Travellers, or shun the racism? Is it helping?
I’m not sure, to be honest. There’s Traveller groups like Pavee Point who do great work in community building and advocacy. But Travellers are a very small minority of the population (just a few tens of thousands of people) with sparse resources. And the level of hatred towards them is blatant as well as ubiquitous. Like, using anti-Traveller slurs is considered perfectly acceptable in polite society.
People don’t think you can be racist against Travellers because they literally don’t see them as people.
That’s a funny coincidence. I could find some hundred year-old American newspapers and find comments EXACTLY like those, except they would have the word “Irish” in the place of “Travelers”.
Or, maybe not so funny.
And the US is the exact same way, right now, about hispanic immigrants.
That’s the same sort of shit people (still) say about blacks and hispanics in America.
How’s the police brutality situation over in Ireland?
Well, our police generally don’t have guns (and we don’t have a culture of people owning guns either). The police are by no means perfect but we don’t have a US-style epidemic of them murdering people on the street.
Well, at least there’s that.
Police brutality? Are you having a laugh. Police stations have closed all around the country. Crime is growing out of control, and criminals regularly don’t go to jail. Here’s a list of crimes that won’t get you in jail in Ireland. You don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country with an actual justice system.
Hit and run
Burglary
Aggravated assault
GBH
Rape
Manslaughter
Infanticide
I repeat. You will not go to jail for committing any of those crimes.
You severely overestimate the US (in)justice system.
Of course people go to jail for those crimes here.
YES, there are times when people don’t. Yes, there are judges who give absurdly tiny sentences for crimes like rape. And yes, the usual structures of privilege do mean that some people get away with things that they absolutely shouldn’t.
This is a problem.
And the way to solve it isn’t blanket context-free hyperbole.
[…] We're Sorry For Your Loss, But You Can't Come In: Irish people's hatred of Travellers is shameful. […]
Sounds similar to how other European countries treat the Roma people.
Derpa Nerp,
You can have dozens of uncaring people kicking their dogs and people won’t bat an eye. But that same person sees a Roma man kicking a dog and it’s “Those people are animals”.
If there is a rude guy in the tram, people will react differently, but if that rude guy is also Roma people will immediately jump to linking his rude behavior to his ethnicity.
For another comparison: https://xkcd.com/385/
To be fair, people will react if they see someone kicking a dog, it’s just that they won’t go from “that guy is a jerk” to “those people are jerks”, except perhaps in reference to that person’s immediate family or something.
I’m trying to not be so ignorant. Is there somewhere you can recommend that discusses Travelers as in their background/sociology? I’m in the US and not familiar with the term Traveler. Are they homeless, nomads, migrants, etc.? I can understand why they would be homeless as a cause of being in a marginalized group, rather than choosing to travel to find work.
I’m American, but I lived in Ireland for 6 years, and the amount of BLATANT anti-traveller prejudice shocked me. Just offhand comments! The time I was at a party, and people were talking about literature and James Joyce, and one guy said dismissively “He was a k–.” Or when I was looking at a pair of earrings and was told “Hoop earrings make you look like a traveller,” with the understanding that this is a bad thing. And the ubiquitous jokes about a traveller selling you a gate or stealing your dog. I didn’t even grasp that the k-slur is indeed a slur for years, it’s that normalized. (And I’m retroactively ashamed and angry at my past self for throwing it around before understanding what I was saying.)
And I saw all this from people who are mostly openminded and liberal. I doubt anyone I’m friends with would have written a hateful tweet, but they definitely are just as guilty of jokes about gates and dogs.