"Travellers are losing their culture," Davey Collins shakes his head ruefully. "I'd give it 20 years."
At 68, Collins is considered elderly by Travellers' standards, being one of just 4.4 per cent over the age of 55. "The young Travellers today don't bother with the likes of me any more."
Sitting on a ledge of cushions against one wall inside the large, spotlessly clean mobile home in which he and his wife, Molly, live, he muses over whence his community has come and where, sorrowfully, he sees it going.
Though he has lived here, on St Joseph's halting site in Finglas, Co Dublin, for almost 20 years and has relatives in each of the other 25 mobile homes on-site he will, he says, always have a yen to go travelling.
Born in Co Westmeath in 1932 to Michael and Mary (nee McDonagh) Collins, he had seven brothers and three sisters.
"I was reared around the Cavan-Meath border. We might take an odd notion of a run down to Kerry for the Fair of Puck or over to Sligo, but mainly we stayed all around the same 50 square-mile area."
Albeit through rose-tinted lenses, he recalls almost no antagonism between his family and the settled community, through the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, he says, the Travellers were a positive boon to the community.
"We mixed well with the country people," he smiles, remembering some of the characters. "There was a man at the crossroads between Mullagh and Virginia called Thatcher Brady. He had a son, James, and a girl, Mary. And there was Packie Gillick, and we used to play cards with them at that crossroads.
"There was Ruby O'Neill, the `Queen of Killinkere'. I used to pull the flax for her to be sent to Co Down to be made into linen.
"In Kells we used to pick the spuds for the McFadden families. We went where the work was, and used to make the vessels people needed, from sheets of tin. We'd make saucepans, cans, measures, milking cans, supply the shops as well as the people.
"Oh, there's no doubting the [settled] people put a lot more value on us then than they do now."
Like his brothers and sisters he had no formal education. He learnt neither to read nor write. He got work in England when he went to Manchester with his wife and family, as work grew scarce here in the 1960s.
They married when he was 20 and she 17. Their families had known each other before.
When the young family returned, they settled for a time in Mullingar. They were allocated a house in Barrack Street but trouble with two other Traveller families prompted them to leave for Dublin.
"In the past, in times of feuds Travellers would just move off," he says, "go to another part of the country and wait for it to blow over." Asked why feuding and violence seem synonymous with Traveller life, he says it has to do with the importance attached to the extended family. "When so many are married and related and the extended family is so important, if there's an argument the others want to move in on the dispute."
Stressing that violent feuding occurs between just three or four families, he names one, saying: "They are just bitter. No one suits them."
Media reports of fights give the impression that all Travellers are fighting all the time. He asks whether, if there were 22,000 French people living in Ireland and some had fights between themselves, the media would report on vendettas and "blood feuds" among the whole community.
Some of the misunderstanding of the community is down to the Travellers' tradition, he agrees, to the fact that as literally travellers they never put down roots in one area, so becoming and remaining a community apart.
"When the old way of making a living went, and economic changes forced us to move to towns we became more visible. Maybe we began to be seen as not so positive, more as a burden."
To survive economically the community today must send its children to school and so stay in one place. Its adults must stay in one place to collect social welfare. Ironically, economic survival threatens their ethnic survival, he says.
He does his bit to try and keep it going, teaching the Traveller patois, Cant, a mix of old and modern Irish, and English in the nearby St Joseph's Training Centre. "But the young ones don't like learning it."
Though he would love to travel again, he hasn't been on the road since 1980 when the family returned from another spell in England.
"I suppose I'll stay here now, with the rest of them." As if on cue, to illustrate the tug-of-war he feels, a man from the Department of Social Welfare pulls up outside as we talk. Excusing himself, Davey goes out to get a form which will allow him to obtain a particular type of herbal medicine he favours, for gout; a form he could not get if he was travelling.
Returning, he sits in something like resignation.
"It's sad that the old ways are going. Very sad. I like the old way, but then them lot in Moore Street [market traders] like the old way, and it's going there, too."