Dread that all will suffer for crimes of the few

LAST week a senior police officer finally confirmed out loud, for the record, one of our worst kept secrets. Asked a direct question by a radio journalist, he had little choice but to answer it. Yes, members of the travelling community were among those suspected of the recent spate of "attacks on the rural elderly.

Although similar statements had already appeared in print - in The Irish Times and elsewhere - broadcasting them was like breaching a dam. Decades of fear, suspicion, hatred and naked prejudice came roaring through.

A distressed male traveller contacted The Irish Times to beg for some sort of understanding: "There are poor women out there crying because their children are being slagged at school ... being called killers and things like that, he said. "They're having to take their kids out because of it. We need a little help. Supposing an old beggar woman approaches someone in a farmyard? She could have her head blown off..."

He was on his way to the ferry at Dun Laoghaire to get his children away from it all for "a little holiday".

An 11 year old traveller child - an intelligent girl well able to monitor the news in the papers and on television - confessed to her mother she "was hanging her head in shame" this week, terrified the teacher would implicate travellers in a class discussion about recent attacks.

At Pavee Point, a centre in Dublin where travellers and settled people work together, a small gathering of traveller men and women tried to put a brave face on it. Already defensive, despairing and fearful of a backlash, they found their misery compounded by shocking reports from Sligo Circuit Court this week involving a travelling family from Bawnogue Caravan Site, Clondalkin, Co Dublin.

The court heard Peter and Josephine Connors had driven to Sligo after a tip off from another traveller who gave them directions to the house of an old woman living near Cliffoney. There would be a lot of money there, he told Peter Connors; he knew where all the old people lived, he said, and where all the money was.

Armed with this information, the couple took their three children - aged seven, eight and 10 - along on the trip to Cliffoney, to a remote house which had neither telephone nor electricity. While the two younger children played in the yard, the 10 year old took part in the brutal beatings of the woman and her elderly sister, during which Josephine Connors was said to have inflicted most of the injuries.

After ransacking the house, they sped away with £3,400 in cash, but crashed the car and had to take to the fields. Peter Connors, who was out on bail at the time, was found by gardai hiding under boats with his son. His wife and two other children were traced to a caravan where £2,000 was recovered from its hiding place in the clothes of the eight year old girl. While sentencing Peter Connors to eight years and his wife to six, Judge Sean O'Leary ordered arrangements be made to have the children taken into care.

FOR many in the settled community, the case seemed to encapsulate every ghastly suspicion they had ever entertained about both adult and child travellers. At Pavee Point, several women expressed great anger about the couple's activities and in particular the involvement of the children. All of them have been revolted by the attacks on the elderly. But their cherished separate traveller identity, their status as a distinct social - some would claim ethnic grouping, becomes their greatest problem at times like this.

Their dilemma, articulated clearly by one young traveller woman this week, is this: can they celebrate the achievements of a successful traveller one minute - holding him or her up as a community model - and the next claim the same community should not be identified when a number of its members behave dishonourably?

The dilemma for all Irish communities, including the media, is that as long as a problem is evaded for fear of offending people or of provoking a backlash against an identifiable grouping, that problem may never be confronted. Meanwhile fear, innuendo and outright lies feed bouts of hysteria.

No one knows better than travellers of increasing hostility and vigilante style harassment, even assault, by the settled community.

But there are many who believe the settled community has a case. On the one hand, they say, travellers clamour for rights and resources; on the other, many travellers fail to acknowledge they carry some responsibility for a lifestyle conducive to premature death, high rates of infant mortality and hit and miss education.

There are no official figures to prove or disprove the crime case against travellers. But it is hardly surprising to find that, like other severely disadvantaged communities such as the Australian Aborigines, African Americans or even those from certain parts of Ireland's major cities, they are disproportionately represented in the prisons.

Figures obtained by The Irish Times suggest roughly 10 per cent of sex offenders in Arbour Hill and Wheatfield prisons are travellers. Of Mountjoy's total prison population, traveller men make up around 5 per cent of the male inmates, and traveller women well over 10 per cent of the females. Given that travellers number, about 22,000 and constitute only about 0.5 per cent of the population, these figures are hardly reassuring.

Nor is a random search through the court reports. Back in 1985, when the last serious spate of crimes against the elderly was waning, Det Chief Supt John J. Moore told this newspaper the majority of the criminals involved were "people who had not settled or who did not have any fixed abode".

FILES going back many years document crimes against the elderly in rural areas committed often by criminals within those categories. These include a 1981 incident in which four men, wearing nylon stockings as masks, raided the home of four elderly brothers in Mayo; of the two brothers who resisted, one aged 79 was beaten to death; the other died about three weeks later.

In 1986, an 18 year old traveller got seven years for a crime that involved gagging and blindfolding an elderly Waterford woman and stuffing her nightdress into her mouth while demanding to know the whereabouts of other elderly people living in the area. Still in her nightclothes, she was forced into the back of a car, and later into the boot, before being driven 17 miles away and locked into a hut.

In 1989, Portlaoise Circuit Court was told of an attack on an 86 year old Kilkenny farmer, during which he was severely beaten and sexually assaulted. At one stage, the attackers lit papers and held the flame over their victim. They got away with £7. A 21 year old traveller - illiterate and without any formal education - later pleaded guilty to being involved in the attack.

In January last year, a 78 year old publican and former Mayo footballer was partially blinded by criminals who broke into his home twice within four days. The court was told that on the first occasion, the attackers were drinking in the bar while some of their children went upstairs and opened a safe. Though challenged by the old man, they got away with £10,000. Four days later they returned at 7 a.m., beat him up for an hour, tied him up and stuffed papers in his mouth until he almost suffocated. They got away with another £3,000.

Crime by travellers has long been characterised by attacks on old people in isolated areas. There are countless stories of robberies on elderly women by young women, who simply push them aside and use physical intimidation to get money. Apart from the latter, which might be officially described as "petty crime", the governor of Mountjoy Prison, Mr John Lonergan, believes there was always a small element of young traveller men who "were a bit violent". He recalls a 1968 case in Cork in which a number of travellers were sentenced to eight years for breaking into a remote house, trapping the elderly occupants in the bedroom by tying the door and then attempting to set the house on fire.

The problem is that for as long as a tiny number of small, brutal gangs have, been carrying out this type of assault, the many have been tainted with the crimes of the few. When three bodies were found within a few days of each other last week, and travellers were named as suspects for previous attacks, the entire travelling community felt the weight of public censure and aggression, with their children providing the most tragic, vulnerable targets.

"It's a sad thing to say," said Martin Collins, a traveller and former Young Citizen of the Year, "but we felt a sense of relief when someone who wasn't a traveller was charged with Joyce Quinn's murder. We feel the mobs of vigilantes emerging."

Only unreconstructed bigots could support the notion that travellers as a whole are pathologically aggressive - a notion easily dispelled by meeting members of that community.

As in every community, travellers know there are elements within their grouping which warrant being given a wide berth. Far from being the cosy, extended family of myth, many travellers live in fear of other travellers. Instances of extreme aggression between travellers are not hard to come by travellers themselves recall attacks in Kildare, Portlaoise, Kilbeggan and Blanchardstown.

In a forthcoming paper, Mr Jim McLaughlin of University College, Cork, suggests one reason for this: "When nomadism is geographically circumscribed, or, where the sedentary life develops, notions of territory emerge often causing settled travellers' to react against nomadic newcomers, thereby feeding into racist perceptions of travellers as pathologically aggressive".

Conditions in these camps, he says, are often as unbearable for travellers as they are for neighbouring settled communities, particularly where the increase in traveller population is fuelling anti traveller prejudice.

The travelling community is bonded by that prejudice, among many other things. There is evidence of a siege mentality, within which there is a reluctance to take on board the ills that stalk their community as well as others.

Mr John O'Connell, who works alongside travellers at Pavee Point, acknowledges there are hard questions to be addressed by all of them. He is deeply concerned about the crime rate, alcholism, violence against women and the spread of pornography, even drugs, among travellers. The upsurge of sex crimes in particular he attributes to upheavals in the traditional traveller lifestyle.

"Travellers had quite rigid codes of behaviour and parents were into controlling the sexuality of their children," he said. "Then they got landed into a totally different situation: children were being brought up in an urban situation, suddenly exposed to all those influences, traumatised by the rapid change from very rigid sexual behaviour to anything goes . . ."

Like Mr Lonergan, he believes the individual cannot be isolated from his context. No one could ignore the background of, say, one young traveller - a convicted rapist currently serving one of the longest sentences handed down for that and other crimes.

Already abused and neglected, he was sent into care and ended up at Trudder House - a care facility for traveller children - where he was allegedly sexually abused. As Padraig O'Morain reported recently in this newspaper, many of those Trudder House children had tragic histories afterwards some brought further tragedy to others. Two were convicted of rape and two of murder. Two committed suicide and a third may have also taken his own life. Others became alcoholics.

HISTORY cannot be ignored nor lessons left unlearned. In his paper, Mr Lonergan adds:

"Professor Art O'Connor says crime is a choice that people make but I believe they are not in a position to make logical choices based on education and upbringing that normal people have. By the age of 15 or 16, their childhood formation has left such a huge mark on them, they are not on a level playing pitch.

"The majority of people in prison have no self esteem: they believe they have nothing to lose and that no one cares about them. How can you instill in them a respect for others when they have no respect for themselves?"