Fintan O’Toole: Travellers keep us settled in our ways

If Travellers did not exist, Irish society would have to invent them. How else could the rest of us possibly be described as “settled people”?

It escaped general notice that last week, the Minister for the Environment, Alan Kelly, announced the creation of a number of new halting sites in Dublin. He didn't say "halting sites", of course. He said "modular housing units for homeless families". But if you take prejudice out of the equation, how would you define a halting site? As a piece of ground set aside for the construction of temporary dwellings to house people of no fixed abode. That's exactly what the Government is creating. In a welcome, if admittedly very limited, response to the housing crisis, it is planning to place 500 prefabricated houses on sites across the city.

Alan Kelly stressed that these “modular units” are an emergency response, that families will occupy them on a temporary basis and that those families will still be classified as homeless. “The families that avail of these [houses] will continue to have the full set of supports available from homelessness services. They will not be considered to be housed by the local authority, they will remain ‘homeless’ for statistical purposes, but they will be in a better environment where their family life will be minimally disrupted. The homes will be built to all necessary building standards, with the sites being selected on the basis of access to community infrastructure and services”.

Homelessness

And on the very same day that the Minister announced this crisis response to homelessness, Dún Laoghaire–

Rathdown County Council

confirmed that, in the face of opposition from local residents, it was abandoning plans for a temporary halting site for the survivors of the horrific Carrickmines fire. It would instead house those traumatised people in a carpark beside the council depot at Ballyogan.

Spot the differences. In the first case, 500 families will be placed on halting sites with access to community infrastructure and services, with respect for their family lives and in temporary accommodation decent, safe and properly regulated.

In the second, people who have suffered unbearably from the lack of precisely these things still can’t get access even to minimally acceptable halting sites. Let’s not kid ourselves about why these cases, unfolding on the same day in the same city, differ so starkly. It’s because the second group of people are Travellers.

The difference is not poverty: both groups are poor. It’s not about being of no fixed abode: the “modular units” are explicitly designed not to be permanent homes. It’s not even about the fear of nomadism. Irish society is currently producing what we should call the new nomads – an ever-larger population of people in constant search of temporary, makeshift, unsettled shelter. No – it’s about ethnicity. Traveller ethnic identity is denied official recognition, but strongly affirmed in the most emphatic way – through the prejudice that they suffer.

We’re about to have an empirical test of this. When Alan Kelly’s halting sites start to be developed, will local residents block the entrances ? I guess not. There is considerable contempt for the poor in this society, but not quite at the level where poor people can automatically be characterised as Them, a sub-group defined by a deep sense of cultural difference.

Of course we have to watch our language very carefully. Call Kelly’s halting sites “halting sites” and there’s no knowing which way it might go. It is imperative that we stick with “modular housing units”. Unfortunate fellow citizens live in modular housing units. Only shifty Travellers live on halting sites.

If the Government can provide reasonably dignified temporary homes to 500 homeless families in a short period, why can’t it do the same for Traveller families? We’re now accepting as a society that housing policy is so dysfunctional that we have to house some people in explicitly impermanent settings. We’re accepting that if you have to do this, the least you can do is to make sure that the makeshift houses are safe, decent, well-serviced and connected to the wider community. Why should this be okay for the new nomads but not for the old nomads?

Out-group

Could it be because Irish society as a whole quite likes having Travellers as the convenient out-group onto which it can project its shame and its neuroses? If the Celtic Tiger taught us anything it is that we have a collectively neurotic relationship to that vague but powerful thing called “home”. The obsession with getting “a foot on the property ladder” betrayed a deep anxiety about what ground our feet might be planted on otherwise.

We have nothing else to stand on, no deeper sense of what it means to be at home here. Travellers are hated because they don’t share Irish society’s great article of faith: that without a house you’re nothing. They provide negative reassurance that a culture deeply shaped by mass migration, and utterly neurotic about its sense of home, is “settled”. Being superior to Travellers is our only way of convincing ourselves that Ireland is a fixed abode.