"What is a knacker? I mean do I look like a knacker?" asks a young girl in one of a series of three new radio advertisements being broadcast as part of the Citizen Traveller public awareness and education campaign.
The £900,000 (€1,142,764) three-year campaign is Government-funded and has been developed by a partnership of organisations working with the Traveller community in Ireland. The aim is to create a better understanding between the settled and Traveller communities.
The 30 and 90-second radio advertisements stand out in a very noisy medium because they use the voices of travellers to tell their story and, uniquely, they were unscripted.
PCC, the Dublin-based, not-for-profit advertising and communications company, brought Travellers of all ages into a studio and recorded nearly three hours of personal experiences of discrimination.
According to the project's co-ordinator, Ms Jacinta Brack, radio was chosen for the usual budgetary reasons but also because "people form opinions about Travellers without ever having spoken to one. This way individuals can be heard".
Ms Cathleen McDonagh, a Traveller and a Traveller community chaplain, was also keen on the medium for a very different reason. "Travellers have a strong oral tradition anyway," she says, "and with radio you hear voices that show that it's not all about issues, its about real people." Ms Brack's background is in social campaigning for Cairde, a HIV/AIDS service provider, and in public relations, most recently for Edelman PR.
"This first year of the campaign will concentrate on discrimination and accommodation," says Ms Brack. "The radio campaign is just the first step."
Travellers in the advertisements talk about being refused service, living without basic sanitary facilities and the importance of education in their lives. The end line, common to all three commercials, is "supporting Travellers as an ethnic group", which highlights the major weakness of the content of the radio advertisements - they make no attempt to explain what that ethnicity or separate culture actually means.
Time and again that touchstone of the public mood - phone-in radio shows - reveal it is that lack of understanding on a fundamental level that is the key to the problem.
Ms McDonagh accepts the criticism but says that what the initial radio campaign is trying to do is to give listeners "space to think about the issue of Travellers in the community".
Ms Brack points out that the idea was to start an awareness campaign that isn't "campaigning".
"Early next year there will be a National Traveller Week," says Ms Brack of the ongoing PR element in the project, "and this hopefully will help to show and explain Traveller culture."
The radio campaign will run until the end of this month and, after the first year, the awareness campaign will move on to cover issues including social exclusion, education, health and equal status.
