When a Traveller family is denied a wake for their boy

Prejudice against Travellers is the hate that dares to speak its name. Refer to black people as “niggers” and you are likely to be removed from the company, possibly without your feet touching the ground. But “knackers”? A mild reproof maybe. But just as likely a giggle or guffaw.

A few years ago I spoke at a meeting in a pub in village in Leitrim about the civil rights campaign in the North. Had it all been futile, were the demands still relevant, had the shift to Republican armed struggle been inevitable? As I was leaving, I noticed a small stack of ashtrays on a ledge along one of the walls. How come, with smoking in pubs having recently been banned?

“It’s for when the knackers are in town.” If the doors were left open, gatherings of “knackers” would march in and order drink. Regular patrons couldn’t wander out and in for a smoke. So they were allowed to light up until the danger had passed.

A brief debate ensued. Some customers did seem shamefaced. But the only one I can remember speaking up strongly against the arrangement was Martin Kenny, recently Sinn Féin candidate in the Roscommon-South Leitrim byelection. Had I had a vote in the constituency, on that ground alone, I might have given him my number one.

Customers peered out

Some months later, a Travellers’ group in Letterkenny invited me to speak at a protest against curtailment of their halting rights. About 200 of us set off to march to Market Square behind one of those nostalgic horse-drawn caravans. The doors of every pub along the route were shuttered. Customers peered out from the windows. I suggested we make our displeasure plain, by way of shouting “Shame!”, or something such, but was quickly shushed: “You’ll only make it worse for us.” It struck me that if we had taken this approach in the North, there might still be a government at Stormont, probably headed by a grandson of Lord Brookeborough. These and a scattering of similar brief experiences came to mind at reports this week of a Traveller family being turned away from a funeral home where they had wanted to wake their 14-year-old son. Michael Ryan Funeral Directors of Ashbourne had agreed to accommodate the wake until they discovered that the dead child was a Traveller. His mother, Anne Joyce, was awarded the maximum compensation of €6,384 by the Equality Tribunal.

There is a great deal happening in the world and in our own little patch of the world to fill our mind-space to the brim – wars, Ebola, tottering governments, austerity. But it still seems dismaying that the incident at Ashbourne hasn’t sparked uproar.

You’d think funeral directors would be better disposed towards Travellers. After all, they are great customers, tending to die at a faster rate that any other section of Irish society.

The All Ireland Traveller Health Study found in 2010 that, on average, male Travellers can expect to live to 61, Irish men in general to 76. Traveller women will likely die at 70, settled women at 85. The death rate for Traveller infants is 14.1 per 1,000 live births – compared with 3.9 for the population in general. Our society may not be killing Travellers directly, but we are certainly, systematically depriving them of life.

Reflects attitudes

The culling of Traveller lives reflects attitudes which, if not explicitly endorsed, are widely regarded as within the bounds.

In Athlone, District Judge Séamus Hughes compares Travellers to “Neanderthal men living in the long grass, abiding by the laws of the jungle”.

Donegal county councillor Seán McEniff calls in so many words for the “segregation” of Travellers from the rest of the community. In Ballyshannon, a council house allocated to the Ward family, Travellers, is burned to the ground before they can move in.

The Irish Examiner told in March that "A large lagoon of water and raw untreated sewage poses a serious health and drowning risk to almost 100 children living alongside it." Separate reports by an engineer, an environmental health officer and a director of public health nursing in 2012 detailed the scarcely believable conditions in which 33 families were living at the Spring Lane halting site on Cork's northside.

A “consultative forum” set up, involving Travellers, settled residents and representatives of various State agencies, collapsed without agreement on any way forward. The families continue to live amid the ugliness in which their children first saw the light of day. The first time I ever thought seriously about Travellers’ rights was in the early 1960s, when Ciaran McKeown – subsequently, with Máiread Corrigan and Betty Williams, a founder of the Peace People – cajoled me onto a demonstration at the Bord Fáilte office in Castle Street in Belfast, marking the death of five-year-old Linda Doyle from respiratory failure in a rag tent at a site in Ballyfermot.

Not much change there, then.