Travellers on Travellers

THE FIRST THING I notice about John McCarthy, as we shake hands, is that the 50-year-old’s fingers are badly misshapen and shortened. Then I notice the skin graft on the right side of his face, including his ear; and, as he sits over coffee in Bewley’s, further, extensive grafts on both palms, his left inner arm, right elbow and forearm.

McCarthy does not remember getting these third-degree burns from the stove in the family’s caravan, because he was only 11 months old at the time. What McCarthy does remember is how he was treated afterwards, as a child, by his father. “My father could be violent. And he didn’t want me to be taking pity on myself, so I was given all the hard jobs, including fetching water, to make me a man.”

Because McCarthy’s damaged hands were unable to grip objects throughout his childhood, he had to find other ways to carry the buckets of water he had to collect when they stopped to make camp. “I’d carry them over my arm. Or on the crook of my arm. Then I got smart. I used a pram, and then a trolley. I got clever and innovative, because it was in my interest to be that way.”

McCarthy was born in Gateshead in England. His Irish father, a horse-dealer, and his Welsh mother, a fortune-teller, had met at Ballinasloe Horse Fair. The family travelled all over England, never stopping anywhere for very long, which meant he did not receive all the skin grafts he needed as he grew up. “I’m not saying my family neglected my medical needs, but they made no great effort to help me,” he says. His formal education consisted of a few broken months. He started learning to read during his stints in hospital. “The really nice people in my life at that time were the nurses and doctors.”

At 13, when his father died, McCarthy came to Ireland for the first time. His father’s body was returned for burial at Birr, Co Offaly. “I thought everyone in Ireland was a Traveller because they all had the same accents that we had,” he says with a laugh.

“When my father died, I was the eldest unmarried boy, so I had to become the man overnight.” From 13, he was driving lorries without tax or insurance to collect scrap and haul tarmac. He improvised with the steering wheel by using his elbows, and a younger brother rode alongside to change the gears.

When he was 16, and expected to marry, he found himself playing pool in a pub in Manchester one night. It is a night he has never forgotten. “I stared at a man, who stared right back at me, and then I thought, Why did I do that?” It was his first signal that he was gay, although he could not yet acknowledge that fact to himself.

“Then I was 18. I should have been married. I had already brought shame on the family because two younger sisters had got married before me. But I knew I was different.”

The pressure of living in a tight community where men were expected to marry young made him “feel suicidal. I had nobody to talk to. All I wanted to do was kill myself,” he says. He went to the Samaritans and talked about feeing suicidal. “The man there suggested I might be gay.” He realised the counsellor was right, and the knowledge terrified him.

“I was a Traveller man. I couldn’t be gay. I drove lorries. And it was the 1980s. The shame! It would have been more acceptable to me if I had been told I had cancer. How was I going to tell my burly big brothers, and my mammy? We were respectable. We were fairly well off. I was considered a good catch. My mammy had Crown Derby china.”

At that point the family was living in a camp at Vauxhall in London. There was a gay pub in the area. McCarthy went there as often as he dared, leaving before closing time to go and join male Travellers in another pub where they habitually drank. “But I was seen going into the gay pub. Gossip got out.”

One evening, when he was in the gay pub, a group of Traveller men from his camp, many of them his uncles and cousins – “my own people”, as he puts it – roared in. “They broke up the place. They were looking for me.” He was gone, having escaped though the fire exit. “I ran for my life.”

That night, his trailer was burned, with everything of value in it first having been stolen, as women on the site later told him. He stood on a nearby flyover and watched his trailer burning in the camp below. He never returned there. He was still only 18.

The gay community became his alterative family and source of support. He accessed social services, received accommodation, learned to read and write, and started driving a bus for children with disabilities.

He also received proper medical treatment for his burns and damaged muscles and tendons. A surgeon told McCarthy that the location of his burns indicated classic push-pull syndrome. This, he discovered, occurs when someone is pushed, side on, against a heat source. They instinctively try to pull away, using the other side of their body to brace themselves, but that side is also burned because they are held there, deliberately.

“What do you do with that information?” he asks, suddenly close to tears. “Who did that to me?”

He tried several times over the years to reach out to his family, “because I’m a Traveller, and family is so important to us, no matter what.” For the most part, they shunned him. His mother moved to Dublin, and, after they had met and talked at length at a funeral, he followed. “I thought she had accepted me, so I came to live in Ireland. I misjudged it. My mother told me when I arrived, ‘You’ve done nothing only bring shame on me and your family. I’ll never accept you. I’d rather you were dead, and when I die I don’t want you at my funeral.”

Despite his mother’s reaction McCarthy stayed on in Ireland. And he did attend her funeral.

Today he lives in his own house in Dublin, has a degree in social care, and works full-time as a social care worker. “I’m a Traveller who’s beaten the odds. Discrimination. Isolation. Ostracisation. They’re big words. But you know what? I know settled people still look at me and think, You’re a nice knacker, you’re an educated knacker – but you’re still only a knacker.”

McCarthy, who is an active member of a number of Traveller support organisations, says, “Travellers are isolating themselves; living in communities. They have strict morals, ethics and codes, and are less integrated now than they ever were.

“The Travelling community is still very male-dominated and chauvinistic. I think a lot of it is about keeping women down. Men still wield the power. Living on a site, when you know you’re culturally different if you’re gay, you have two options: the rope or get up and leave. And if a Traveller leaves, their life experience is very limited. They are more likely to be uneducated, and their relationship with the settled community has become historically bad. And they find it hard to access services.”

McCarthy decided to go on the record for this interview, because “I want to know I’ve opened doors so that other young Traveller men can know they can be gay, and valued members of the community. I want to make the word ‘gay’ able to be spoken about in the Travelling community.”

EIGHT OF THEyoung people sitting around the table in a meeting room in St Catherine's primary school off Model Farm Road in Cork are involved with Spring Lane Young Traveller Women's Group. Christina, Sylvia, Noreen, Mary, Philomena, Julianne, Eileen and Samantha McCarthy are aged between 13 and 23. Some live on the Spring Lane halting site; others are in houses. Bridget Carmody, chair of Cork Traveller Women's Network, is sitting in with them, as is Sandra McCarthy, a voluntary youth leader.

Sandra got married at 16. “I wanted to get it over with,” she says. “Traveller girls are different to settled girls,” declares Bridget. “They’re much more mature at 16. Settled girls have childish ways. They’re not used to caring for children or helping run the house.”

Christina, who is 23, who is training as a youth leader, says she “wants to be a role model for the younger generation of Travellers”. She is single and comes from a family of nine children. “I want to see more of life before settling down. Growing up, you see how hard it is to cope with all the kids. Travellers are having smaller families now: two, three, or four. Nine used to be normal.”

“Respect” is a word the girls use frequently. “If the girl is respected, the family is respected,” Bridget says.

What is the definition of respect? As the group explain it, respect, for a Traveller girl, is not having sex before marriage and not being alone with a boy, especially after dark. “So that you’re not putting shame on a young girl’s family,” Christina says.

As for unmarried Traveller parents, as far as the Spring Lane group is concerned, they don’t exist.

“If a Traveller girl gets pregnant and she’s not married, the chances are she’ll have to live with her parents for the rest of her life, because she’ll never get a husband when she has a baby,” says Bridget.

They talk of girls being chaperoned by brothers or cousins before marriage, and of how unmarried girls cannot be seen to drink alcohol as fathers worry they may lose control and endanger themselves.

Do they think this is fair? “It’s unfair,” Christina says. “I think it’s unfair too,” Julianne says. “A Traveller boy can do what he likes, but girls are restricted,” says Philomena. “That’s life, isn’t it, and you’ve got to get on with it,” says Sandra.

If there are apparently no unmarried Traveller parents, neither do there seem to be any gay Travellers, according to the Spring Lane group.

“There are no gay people in the Travelling community,” most say, clearly horrified at the question.

“You could be gay, but you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone,” Samantha says.

“It’s so much harder for a Traveller boy to come out,” says Bridget.

“It’s double discrimination. It’s not just about one person, like it would be if a settled boy came out.

“For a Traveller boy, it’s shame for the whole extended family, the community, and the relationship the family has with everyone else on the site.”

Everyone agrees that the expression “knacker” is the nastiest verbal insult that can be directed at Travellers. Their expression for non-Travellers is “country people”, or sometimes, “dirty country people” but as Sandra emphasises, “That’s not an insult the way ‘knacker’ is a horrible insult, it’s just our description for settled people.”

One of the girls talks about frequently coming into the classroom and finding “knacker” written on the blackboard. Did she report it? She rolls her eyes. “Teachers don’t do anything. You find out who did it yourself.” And then what? “You give them a beating, of course.” Has she done this herself? Has anyone else? More than one of the girls nod. Nobody else around the table makes any comment, queries the girls or pulls them up on their allegation of fighting with fellow students.

Do they envy the freedom their non-Traveller peers have?

There’s a short silence.

“Kind of,” Christina says. “I’d like to have more opportunities for work.”

They have all either been through the school system or are still in it.

What about integration? Do they spend much time with their non-Traveller classmates? “None of the settled girls ever comes to visit us at the site,” Sylvia says. “Settled girls sleep around and are bad examples to Travellers,” says Philomena. “They discriminate against us,” several of the girls agree. “And that discrimination has to have started at home. They must have got it from their parents,” Christina says quietly.

MARY CONNORS, who is 56, lives in a caravan by herself in a regulated halting site on the outskirts of New Ross, Co Wexford. She got married at 19, and has five children, but split up with her husband several years ago.

She grew up moving between England and Ireland, and recalls a different way of Traveller life.

“There’s not much left of Traveller culture,” she says. “The community is split up, the horses are gone, the wagons are gone, the campfires are gone. In the days of the wagons and horses it took you days to get somewhere. You travelled more slowly. You knew everyone. Now I can get in the van and be in Donegal in a day. There are no more horses – not for pulling wagons, anyway. Travellers used to use the horsehair to sell to stuff sofas and chairs. They mended things, in the days when people recycled.

“The only good thing about staying in one place is that children can go to school. But it’s still very hard for the boys to stay in school. There’s peer pressure to leave when they turn about 13.

“A good name, a decent name, is very important for a girl. The boys can do whatever they like most of the time. I could never understand why. It’s not fair and never has been fair. But I do see some young women standing up for themselves now. You see young women driving now. They used not to be allowed do that by their husbands.”

Mary acknowledges that the suicide rate among young Traveller men is almost seven times the national average. “Some suicides are drug- and alcohol-related, but they can’t all be down to that.” She tells a story of one family in which an 11-year-old boy killed himself. A couple of years later, his 19-year-old brother did the same thing.

What she misses most from her childhood as a Traveller is the campfire. “Halting sites are not designed for campfires. If someone lit a fire on the grass here, the council would go mad. But the campfire used to be the centre of a camp. It’s where there was fighting, and drinking, and where weddings were made and broken, stories were told and songs sung. And nothing has replaced it.”

John McCarthy is nominated in the Enterprise and Employment category of the Traveller Pride Week Awards; Spring Lane Young Traveller Women’s Group is nominated in the Youth category and Mary Connors is nominated for the Overall Traveller Pride Week Award.

Winners in the seven categories, which also include sport, arts and culture, music and community, will be announced on Thursday, the first day of Traveller Pride Week