Travellers

Support the Dale Farm families - Put a marker down to stop the racist onslaught against Travellers

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Dale Farm is a halting site  which is also the largest concentration of Irish Travellers in Britain, being home to over 1000 people (about 100 families), many of whom are said to have their cultural roots in Rathkeale in Limerick.  It was started in the 1960s when a number of families bought the former scrapyard site and Basildon council granted planning permission for 40 houses. This happened in the context of broad progress in race relations and a brief breeze of relative official tolerance for Travellers, epitomised in  the liberal-sponsored 1968 Caravan Sites Act.  Basildon Council have put aside an £18 million budget to bulldoze the site and forcefully evict the families (a staggering figure when you consider that in 2010 the total UK budget for providing Travellers with halting facilities was less than 30 million).

Special needs anti-education cuts protest marks end of new Govt. honeymoon

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Hundreds of parents, children, teachers, political representatives and people from communities all over the country gathered outside the Dáil on Wednesday to express their anger and dismay at the government’s plan to cut Special Needs Assistants and Resource teachers.    It was possibly the finest day of this patchy summer, and as one father of a young man with Down syndrome put it, we should be at the beach instead of protesting outside the house of elected representatives. He went on to say that his young boy would not be the great young man he is at 17 without the help and dedication of the Special Needs Assistants who’ve worked with him since he started his education.

Travellers targetted by Limerick County Council

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Limerick County Council has revived an old bylaw to enable it to seize caravans and cars belonging to Travellers.   The move comes as hundreds of members of the families of Travellers who call Rathkeale home arrive for the Christmas break.  This is an annual event that has been going on for years. Due to the lack of facilities families often end up camping on the roadside. This unavoibably causes tension with other local residents and road users. The county council has never made any serious effort to address the shortage of short term halting facilities in Rathkeale over the Christmas despite having fore knowledge of the problem.

Racist Mob Protests Traveller Family - Stand up for Travellers' Rights

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THE PROTESTS against the housing of a Traveller family in Farnagh near Moate were racist. The organisers deny this but then go on to say that their main objection is that they "were not consulted" by the Council about rehousing the family of Alice and Joe Joyce. Do these same people expect to be "consulted" everytime a settled family is given a house? Of course not.

One of the ringleaders, local priest Fr Liam Farrell, even claimed that the protesters were concerned for the family, worried about their transition from an urban to a rural area! More honest was the one who told journalists that he did not want "inferior people" in his town.

 

Ethnicity and Oppression - Who are the Travellers?

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ARE TRAVELLERS a distinct "ethnic" group with their own traditions and customs? Very few people want to accept that they are. This reflects the widespread racism towards them, a racism which insists on seeing them as "failed settled people". They are seen as "problems" rather than a people who have been denied even the most basic rights.

Irish Travellers are a very small minority group, constituting less than 1% of the population. Their numbers currently stand at approximately 23,000 people in the 26 counties and another 1,500 in the North. There are also an estimated 15,000 Irish Travellers in Britain and 7,000 in the U.S.A.

Anti-Traveller Thuggery on the Increase

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Over the past year, there has been a series of physical attacks on Travellers in different parts of the country. Travellers were attacked in Glenamaddy in New Ross, Wicklow and Bantry.

In Bantry, a group of hired vigilantes wearing balaclavas broke into the caravan of an elderly Traveller couple. They hit the woman in the face with a pick axe handle, breaking her nose and giving her dozens of stitches.

Racist attack on Irish Travellers in Glenamaddy, Co Galway in October 1993

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THE ATTACK on Travellers in Glenamaddy, Co Galway last October was a shocking exposure of the extent of the racist attitudes that Irish people have towards Travellers. In Glenamaddy, a small town in east Galway, the Four Winds pub has a policy of serving Travellers. This is such an unusual policy, especially in Galway, that large numbers of Travellers regularly travelled long distances to drink there.

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