Hidden World of Traveller Girls

Thursday, April 29 on NPR’s Morning Edition
A new story from The Hidden World of Girls. This one from Ireland.
Produced by The Kitchen Sisters
In collaboration with Nuala Macklin in Dublin, Nathan Dalton and Laura Folger

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Travellers. The people of walking. Sometimes called the gypsies of Ireland. They speak of non-Travellers as “the settled people.” Mistrusted for the most part and not well-understood. Nomads, moving in caravans, living in encampments on the side of the road. They are the breeders and traders of some of Ireland’s best horses. They have their own language and their tradition as “tinkers” or tinsmiths goes back hundreds of years. As times change in Ireland, and the notions of private and public space change and contract, the culture no longer accepts the Travellers on public and private lands and has begun to create “halts” where they can settle.

Helen Connors lives in Hazel Hill Halting Site, a new government experiment in Traveller housing on the lower slopes of Dublin Mountain, with her husband and two children. She is 21. She left school at 11. “I was bullied a lot in school. You were a “knacker” or a “pikey” that’s all you’d hear everyday. You’d be in trouble nearly every day fighting. I didn’t learn a lot in school. I had one teacher that said to me, “Well a Traveller won’t do nothing with their life. Why would you want to know how to read and write. You’re going to go off and marry young and have loads of children.”

Helen showed us her wedding album. “Whatever you want on your wedding day you have to get,” she said. “When I got married I got to design my own wedding dress – my dream dress. It had a 50 foot train it was all diamonds and lace. Travellers have a mini bride. That’s a girl you just dress up to look just like yourself for the day. Your mini bride has to look like you.”

Helen grew up in a family of seventeen children. When her parents married 47 years ago her mother was fifteen. When Helen married her husband John they lived for three years with his brother in a caravan. Recently they moved into a day house in Hazel Hill. The day house has running water, a kitchen, bath and living room. At night they sleep in their caravan outside.

It’s changed a lot for Travellers in recent years Helen told us. “Years ago you were a tinsmith or you’d shoe horses for a living or you’d do the markets. But everything like that is changed for Travellers. Myself I left school when I was eleven. But then I started a trainer course where I learned how to read and write. Then I did a child care course I passed all my exams. Now I can read and write what I never learned in school. I learned it by myself. Travellers is getting heard more now that what they were years ago. Because they’re speaking up for themselves. Travellers used to not be heard. Now they are.”

In The Hidden World of Traveller Girls we go to Hazel Hill to talk with Helen Connors and Shirley Martin. We visit a settled woman and her daughter who design elaborate Traveller wedding gowns. We travel to Cahirmee Horse Fair in County Cork where young girls with long hair spilling parade and marriages are made. We listen to these young women, their stories and music and explore some of the ancient and modern Traveller rituals clinging on the edge of the Celtic Boom.

SCHOLARS
MARY BURKE, associate professor at the University of Connecticut in Irish studies, was awarded the 2009 College Liberal Arts and Sciences Research Excellence Award in Humanities. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast, and was the NEH Keogh-Haughton Institute Fellow for Irish Studies at University of Notre Dame 2003-4. Her book on the Irish playwright J.M. Synge and the cultural history of the Irish Traveller or “tinker” as they were known, is being published by the Oxford University Press.

JANE HELLEINER, professor of sociology at Brock University of Toronto, received her BA, MA and Ph.D in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She has conducted research in Ireland and Canada. Her book Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (University of Toronto Press) was chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine in 2001. Her most recent work is in the area of critical border studies. She is currently Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies.

CLICK here Full story with web exclusive audio and photos.

Popularity: 4%

6 Comments

Leave a Reply