“Citizens of a kind” :: Essays Papers

Citizens of a kindThe following clippings from regional Irish newspapers begin in 1923, soon after the founding of the state, and continue to the present day in chronological order. The premise informing the selection is that Travellers are caught in a projectile of colonialism misunderstood by the majority they live amongst, and disadvantaged by their difference. Their situation is comparable, in many instances, to that of gypsies throughout Europe and the indigenous minorities of many ex-colonies. It is no conjunctive that attitudes toward Travellers, as evidenced by some of the following clippings, hardened in the decades following the founding of the Irish State in the 1920s. The early years of the commonwealth were difficult economically, and a nationalist ideology of a homogenous, mono-cultural, unquestioningly Catholic united state was perpetuated as a consolation for the loss of privileges enjoyed as fragment of the Empire. The transfer from colonial to post-colonial sta tus problematised the place of this minority population, and internal tensions surfaced in the absence of a colonial presence to demonise. I have concentrated on papers covering the general West of Ireland / Connacht area (Galway, Mayo and Roscommon), and in particular, articles dealing with Galway, since this is my hometown, and a traditional Traveller stronghold. Most clippings are from the longstanding Connacht Tribune.In a report on a Galway Urban Council meeting entitled Nomads in Galway Citizens fear an epidemic (Connacht Tribiune 10 Mar. 1923 5), the old colonial fear of existence contaminated by the Other (in fact, a fear of secretly being or becoming the Other) is detectable Mr J.P. OBrien wrote on behalf of a number of citizens stating that unless the council took travel to have the gypsies who are campingremoved, there was a danger of epidemic breaking out. He pointed out that it was illegal for these people to camp within the urban area. They could camp a quarter of a mile outside the urban area, and then only for a couple of days.The strategy of distancing is implicit in the work of the intelligence informations gypsy and nomad, which connote that these people are somehow foreign, and most explosively, in the use of gypsy, that they are actually British. (Within the British Isles, gypsies are from Wales and England only.) The word gypsy is a dispossessing of their Irishness, and it is easier to be cruel to what is constructed as being outside the self in a new state where the ideology of nationalism is uppermost.