"Catholic" And, "Protestant ", "Nationalist " And, "Loyalist " : Irish Traveller Identity As "Third Space" Mary Burke

Études irlandaises

Negotiating the Bi-Vocal Discourses of "Catholic" and, "Protestant ", "Nationalist " and, "Loyalist " : Irish Traveller Identity as "Third Space" Mary Burke

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Burke Mary. Negotiating the Bi-Vocal Discourses of "Catholic" and, "Protestant ", "Nationalist " and, "Loyalist " : Irish Traveller Identity as "Third Space". In: Études irlandaises, n°29 n°2, 2004. Espaces irlandais : zones et marges. pp. 59-74.

doi : 10.3406/irlan.2004.1717

http://www.persee.fr/doc/irlan_0183-973x_2004_num_29_2_1717

Document généré le 09/12/2015 Abstract Decades of Irish literary criticism set up an exaggerated and bi-vocal opposition of "Catholic" and "Protestant", whilst ignoring the post-partition conflict of landed and landless. The Irish Traveller voice constitutes an imaginative and shared resistance to dominant discourses, and is a "third tradition" that cannot be easily or consistently identified with either "side". The minority's oral tradition subverts and transforms narratives emanating from the majority cultures on the island of Ireland, and literature by and about Travellers disregard the sacred cows of dominant identities, often revealing an alternative version of the past to that sanctioned by official memory. In refuting the fixed identities offered by Northern Irish society, and in embracing fluidity and ambiguity, Bryan MacMahon's novel, The Honey Spike (1967), and Belfast Traveller Nan Joyce's memoir, My Life on the Road (2000), circuitously appropriate the potentially exclusionary discourse of the Traveller as internal exile.

Résumé Tout au long des dernières décennies, la critique de la littérature irlandaise a mis en place une opposition exagérée et bipolaire entre « Catholique » et « Protestant », en ignorant par ailleurs le conflit entre les sédentaires et les gens du voyage, toujours vivace après la partition de 1922. L'esprit des "gitans irlandais" constitue une résistance imaginative et partagée au discours dominant, et présente une « troisième tradition » qui ne peut pas facilement ou systématiquement être identifiée à l'un ou l'autre des deux « camps ». La tradition orale de cette minorité transforme les légendes des cultures prépondérantes sur l'île d'Irlande. La littérature par et sur les gens du voyage ignore « la vache sacrée » des identités dominantes, révélant souvent une révision du passé différente de celle autorisée par l'histoire officielle. Niant les identités bien ancrées d'Irlande du Nord et jouant avec l'ambiguïté, le roman de Byran MacMahon, « The Honey Spike » (1967) et l'autobiographie de Nan Joyce, gitan de Belfast « My Life on the Road » (2000) se sont indirectement appropriés les discours discriminant des gitans Irlandais, vus comme des exilés dans leur propre pays. 65

NEGOTIATING THE BI-VOCAL DISCOURSES OF "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT", "NATIONALIST" AND "LOYALIST" : IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE"

Mary BURKE (University of Connecticut)

Abstract/Résumé l Decades of Irish literary criticism set up an exaggerated and bi-vocal opposition of "Catholic" and "Protestant", whilst ignoring the post-partition conflict of landed and landless. The Irish Traveller voice constitutes an imaginative and shared resistance to dominant discourses, and is a "third tradition" that cannot be easily or consistently identified with either "side". The minority's oral tradition subverts and transforms narratives emanating from the majority cultures on the island of Ireland, and literature by and about Travellers disregard the sacred cows of dominant identities, often revealing an alternative version of the past to that sanctioned by official memory. In refuting the fixed identities offered by Northern Irish society, and in embracing fluidity and ambiguity, Bryan MacMahon's novel, The Honey Spike (1967), and Belfast Traveller Nan Joyce's memoir, My Life on the Road (2000), circuitously appropriate the potentially exclusionary discourse of the Traveller as internal exile. Irish Travellers, "tinkers", oral literature, dominant identity, Northern Ireland, Irish minority, Bryan MacMahon, Nan Joyce, Catholic, Protestant. Tout au long des dernières décennies, la critique de la littérature irlandaise a mis en place une opposition exagérée et bipolaire entre « Catholique » et « Protestant », en ignorant par ailleurs le conflit entre les sédentaires et les gens du voyage, toujours vivace après la partition de 1922. L'esprit des "gitans irlandais" constitue une résistance imaginative et partagée au discours dominant, et présente une « troisième tradition » qui ne peut pas ou systématiquement être identifiée à l'un ou l'autre des deux « camps ». La orale de cette minorité transforme les légendes des cultures prépondérantes sur l'île d'Irlande. La littérature par et sur les gens du voyage ignore « la vache sacrée » des dominantes, révélant souvent une révision du passé différente de celle autorisée par l'histoire officielle. Niant les identités bien ancrées dTrlande du Nord et jouant avec le roman de Byran MacMahon, « The Honey Spike » (1967) et l'autobiographie de Nan Joyce, gitan de Belfast « My Life on the Road » (2000) se sont indirectement appropriés les discours discriminant des gitans Irlandais, vus comme des exilés dans leur propre pays. Gens du voyage irlandais / « gitans irlandais », la littérature orale, l'identité dominante, Irlande du Nord, minorité irlandaise, Bryan MacMahon, Nan Joyce, catholique, protestant.

1. I would like to thank Roisin Kelly-Girard and Sylvain Girard for their kind assistance with the translation of the abstract. 60 Mary BURKE

[The Traveller usage of "country" may be glossed as] a region characterized by family or cultural unities, not necessarily coinciding with county lines [...] 2. In an epoch shaped by nationalist rhetoric, those people who do not claim a land and a written tradition for themselves, who cannot or do not claim a history, are relegated to nature, without a voice in any political process [...] 3.

Irish Travellers (or "tinkers'), a historically nomadic community recently defined in Irish and British law as an ethnic minority, share common descent and discrete cultural practices. Attention has been drawn in post-colonial studies to dominant culture representations of indigenous minorities in America, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Such has not been the case with Ireland, where, although research concerning Irish Travellers has proliferated in the fields of sociology and anthropology, the ideological paradigm within which such data is presented remains opaque. An inquiry into how Travellers have been aggregated in language, and how they themselves have echoed or subverted such discourse in their oral traditions and writings might begin to unlock the complexities of Traveller identity and its imbrication of questions of history, race and belonging. Bryan MacMahon 's novel of Antrim and Kerry Traveller life, The Honey Spike (1967), and Belfast Traveller activist Nan Joyce's memoir, My Life on the Road, (2000 ; originally published as Traveller in 1985) are considered as examinations of the intersection of the minority culture with the historically dominant and contending political, cultural, and religious allegiances on the island of Ireland. A 1783 study that purported to expose the Indian origins of European Gypsies, Heinrich Grellmann's Dissertation on the Gipsies, consolidated the exemplar of the heathenish, asocial Gypsy, whose appetites were in excess of sedentary norms. The itinerant subcultures of the British Isles were increasingly exoticised in the wake of such ethnographic theory 4 ; by the late nineteenth-century, immersion in Gypsy culture had become the hallmark of a certain bohemian constituent of the cognoscenti, and a wave of Victorian writings fixate upon the definition, record, and reform of British Gypsies,

2. Artelia Court et al, Puck of the Droms : The Lives and Literature of the Irish Tinkers, Berkeley, California UP, 1985, p. 255. 3. Katie Trumpener, "The Time of the Gypsies : A 'People Without History' in the Narratives of the West", Critical Inquiry, 18.4, 1992, p. 884. 4. See Mary Burke, "Eighteenth-century European Scholarship and Nineteenth- Century Irish Literature", The, Irish Revival Reappraised, Betsy Taylor FitzSimon and James Murphy eds, Dublin, Four Courts, 2004, pp. 205-16. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 61 represented"tribe" in possession either as anof anundesirable alluring cultureitinerant intrinsically group or as opposed a Romany to sedentary norms 5. An article published in the 1861-62 edition of the Ulster Journal of Archaeology noted the similarity of the "strange Oriental chaunt" of the Irish bacach (tramp) to "the chaunting of a Fakeer", while J.M. Synge later suggested that West Kerry beggars prayed with "almost Oriental volubility [...]" 6. Contemporary race theory underpinned the aim of the apolitical and exoticizing Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1888-) and soi-disant "Gypsylorists" to catalogue the "disappearing" culture of "pure-blooded" British Romanies of Indian origin. The JGLS usually noted that Irish "tinkers" were of indigenous origin and probably racially inferior to "pure" Romanies. Nevertheless, the concept of the archaic origins of the tinker and his language, which Gypsylorists named "Shelta", gained a degree of academic respectability when promoted by the journal ; the esteemed German scholar of Irish, Kuno Meyer, became interested in Shelta on the basis of its perceived link to Old Irish. Subsequently, a fashion for depicting "Irish Gypsies" as the antithesis of the expanding Irish Catholic bourgeoisie emerged amongst Revival-era writers. The transgressive tinkers of Synge's The Tinker's Wedding (1907), in which the nullification of an irregular agreement between a Roman Catholic priest and a family of seditious tinkers leads to violence against the clergyman, of Yeats's Where There is Nothing (1902), in which a politically subversive member of the gentry marries a tinker girl in an attempt to challenge the establishment, or of James Stephens's novel The Demi- Gods (1914), wherein angels befriend law-breaking yet charming tinkers, encoded the bohemian values with which the literati narcissistically identified. The story line celebrating putative tinker or tramp values was ubiquitous in early Abbey productions : Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon (1907) features a ragged ballad singer, while The Travelling Man, her morality play of 1910, portrays Christ in the shape of a tinker ; Seamus O'Kelly's The Shuiler's Child (1909) concerns an ill-fated woman of the roads, while Douglas Hyde's The Tinker and the Fairy (1902) celebrates a wandering fiddler. The reduction of the peripatetic figure in Ulster Literary Theatre productions in contrast to its valorization by the Dublin faction indicates that the vagabond motif was pivotal in the construction of

5. David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1988, pp. 71-72. 6. William Hackett, "The Irish Bacach, or Professional Beggar, Viewed Archaeologically", Ulster foumal of Archaeology, 9, 1861-2, p. 261 ; John Millington Synge, "In West Kerry", Robin Skelton ge,. ed., J.M. Synge: Collected Works, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962-8, vol. II, p. 265. 62 Mary BURKE

the industrial, plain-speaking North and the heritage-laden but impoverished South ; in Gerald MacNamara's The Mist that Does Be on the Bog, a "tramp" is revealed to be a method-writing middle-class dramatist 7. The challenge to dominant cultural values embedded in the deployment of the tinker motif significantly diminished in the post- Revival era. In folk belief, Travellers were constructed a time capsule of Irish degradation, saturated by discourses of eviction, famine, and dispossession, and the comic post-Revival Abbey "stage tinker" carried, in the tradition of representing Travellers as all that had been necessarily abandoned by "progress", the stage Irishman's attributes of fecklessness and tricksterism. The tinker functioned as a one- dimensional figure of colour in many mid-twentieth-century Abbey comedies, and signified imperviousness to patrilineal inheritance and conformity in contemporaneous non-comic Irish drama. The Belfast- born Ruddick Millar (1907-1952) appropriated the tinker as a figure of rural Ulster "authenticity" in Tappytoosey (1950), a comedy centring on a development project that aims to turn a rural idyll into a satellite of Belfast. In the eyes of older villagers, à stubborn squatter named "Tinker" Thompson functions as a welcome hindrance to the unwanted "progress" emanating from the capital. Uncivilised, dirty, and shambolic "Tinker" Thompson dwells in pre-industrial cultural time, and that is where the villagers wish to be too. A 1956 Irish Press article reports on a "six-county" Unionist Council in Belfast, which passed a resolution calling on the government to adopt legislation to control wandering bands of "gypsies, tinkers and vagrants - whom [a councillor] claimed crossed the Border from the Twenty-Six Counties" to "avail themselves of the Six-County public assistance." 8 The post- partition "Southern Irish" associations of the term "tinker" are neutralised in Tappytoosey by the deployment of a resolutely British surname, and one, moreover, memorably utilised in MacNamara's Thompson in Tir-na-nOg (1912), a celebration of Northern loyalist incomprehension in the face of Celtic Twilight shenanigans. In the post-1922 Free State, attempts were made to strip Travellers of Victorian "Gypsylorist" or "Protestant" Revival accretions that constructed the minority as being of suspiciously "Gypsy", foreign, or non-Gaelic origin ; the first government-sponsored statement on "itinerant" issues, The Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (1963), reiterated the folk theory of Traveller origins in the Great Famine of

7. See Mark Phelan, The Rise àf Fall of the ULT, M. Phil, Trinity College Dublin, 1998. 8. "Unionists Call for Curb on Gipsies", Irish Press, 9 Mar. 1956, p. 6. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 63

1845, ignoring evidence of an Irish Traveller presence in the United States since the 1830s. The politicisation of Irish Travellers in the 1960s and 1970s led to the emergence of diverse considerations of Traveller culture by both settled and Traveller commentators and writers. One of the results of Traveller mobilisation was that the "tinker" lifestyle could no longer be apolitically presented as a charming and contented subset of dominant culture, as it had been in Maurice Walsh's best-selling novels, for instance 9. In its attempted naturalism and unmistakable empathy with Traveller life, Bryan MacMahon 's measured portrayal of the minority in the critically acclaimed The Honey Spike (1961) heralded the contemporaneous political movement 10. MacMahon's 1967 novel of that title, very precisely based on his Abbey play, concerns the journey to Antrim of Traveller couple, Breda and Martin Claffey, and their race home from Antrim to Kerry to get the pregnant Breda to what she believes to be a fortuitous hospital, the "honey spike" of the title. Events culminate in Puck Fair, held annually in County Kerry, at which Martin stays on alone, and conclude with Breda's tragic death in childbirth, after she has argued with and separated from Martin. Irish literary practitioners "uncovered" the existence of a Traveller language only after the growth of Traveller activism in the 1960s ; The Honey Spike is one of the few Irish prose fiction works in which speech in Traveller Cant is reported, and may be the only mainstream Irish novel ever published with a title in the Travellers' language. MacMahon strips "Shelta" of its colonial-era accretions as an archaic tongue steeped in mystery, and presents it for what it is to its speakers, a utilitarian, quotidian language. Bryan MacMahon was born in Kerry in 1909, and continued to work as a schoolmaster and sporadic teacher of Traveller children in the Kerry town of Listowel throughout his successful writing career. He was on intimate terms with Kerry Travellers, and may be the only recent Irish writer from a settled background who could actually speak their language. An anecdote he relates in his autobiography intimates that he considers Cant to be a language of equal status to the languages of majority literate culture, rather than a créole or pidgin, as has been

9. In Maurice Walsh's 1934 novel The Road to Nowhere, the flimsy boundary between Traveller and dominant culture effordessly and willingly yields to the penetration of the sedentary adventurer who wishes to "join the tinkers". 10. "The Honey Spike is impelled by much real observation and intimate knowledge ; its realism is lifted by waves of lyricism and emotion and enchantment and song. It is one of the most masterly pieces of theatre that the Abbey has ever produced." Robert Hogan, After the Irish Renaissance, Minneapolis, Minneapolis UP, 1967, p. 73. 64 Mary BURKE

suggested by certain linguists n. MacMahon's narratives engaged with, though never sought to dismantle, the essentialist oppositions of Irish life. The schoolmaster prided himself on his opposition to the dominant discourses of Irish life, and sparred with the educational and clerical establishment throughout his teaching and writing career. The Honey Spike opens at the Giant's Causeway, where the newly- married Breda and Martin have travelled, so that Martin can boast that he has seen "places no Southern traveller ever seen before" 12. The novel was published in the year in which the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was founded, and the sub-plot detailing a Republic of Ireland-based IRA brigade's raid on an RUC station situated north of the border envisages the open conflict of the following decades. While traversing the border, Breda and Martin Claffey reluctantly assist Frank Horan, an IRA man from their home territory of Kerry ; in order to enlist their aid after he has been involved in the attack on the station, Horan both threatens and coerces the couple by reminding them of the debt of previous kindness they owe his father, and the Kerry community in general. In MacMahon's text, the Traveller's loyalty is given to personal relationships and to those willing to do business or treat the minority generously, not to abstract concepts of state or religion. Frustrated at his lack of success in selling his tin products, and irritated that this failure is predicated upon the perception of his family's origins on the southern side of the border, Martin declares : '"Up here, everythin' is cold : the winds, the sea, the islands, and the shore - they all smell like ice. The people here - their eyes are cold. 'Be off, you Fenian Papist beggars !' - that's what they say." The first piece of extended dialogue attributed to the Travelling man at the novel's opening represents him as dismissing both the province itself and the Republic's claim on it : "'The North's a hungry country. [...] If this is the part of Ireland that has been stolen from us, [...] as far as Martin Claffey is concerned the country can stay divided till the crack o' hell.'" When detained for questioning by RUC officers in pursuit of Frank Horan, Breda argues : "'What do we travellers know or care about the goddamn IRA's? [...] Or if this country is broken into two, or two thousand, bits ? Isn't every hand, North an' South lifted against us ? Let us go, I beg of ye'" 13. In a

11. Bryan MacMahon, The Master, Dublin : Poolbeg, 1992, pp. 106-07. The Romani specialist Ian Hancock's consideration of Shelta situates it within the field of pidgin and créole studies : Hancock, Ian, "Shelta : A Problem of Classification", Pidgins and Creoles : Current Trends and, Prospects, Ian Hancock and D. De Camp eds., Washington : Georgetown UP, 1974, pp. 130-37. 12. Bryan MacMahon, The Honey Spike, Dublin, Poolbeg, 1995, p. 29. 13. Bryan MacMahon, ibid., pp. 27 ; 13-14 ; 99. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 65 novel set just antecedent to the onset of "the Troubles", the affair of RUC officer Kenneth Yeoman and Patsy Hegarty, a farmer's daughter from the Republic is doomed, representing as they do, what is presented as the self-evident binary oppositions of North and South, industrialised and agrarian, secular state and priest-ridden theocracy. (The policeman's surname even evokes the origins of the coalescence of the terms "loyal" and "Protestant" in post-1798 Ireland.) Martin, a liminal "tinker" figure, can operate across the border zone between the polarised regions, carrying Horan, who has been injured during his brigade's attack on the police station, "across the line". The symbolism of Breda and Martin's encampment near the border of North and South being "suspended between height and depth, between zenith and nadir" is unmistakable 14. Contemporary Belfast poet Ciaran Carson's "Travellers" opens in an unanchored space that has lost its previous designation in the wake of the minority community's arrival :

On the waste ground that was Market Street and Verner Street, wandering trouserless Through his personal map — junked refrigerators, cars and cookers, anchored Caravans - the small boy trips over an extended tow-bar, picks himself up [...]" 15.

Anthropologists suggest that Travellers, of necessity, employ the alternative spatial languages or "tracings" of kinlines, tradelines and memory lines, rather than conventional maps : Traveller camps are situated on sites "dictated by the calendar of annual fairs, births, deaths and marriages" 16. Intriguingly, within twentieth-century Traveller oral history, the border is represented as an apolitical zone of opportunity : an informant recorded in the transcribed collection of anecdotes, Travellers : A Way of Life, noted that during the Second World War, Travellers exploited the border between the neutral state and the province at war by smuggling goods between Newry and Dundalk 17. Despite recounting the hostility of "B-Men" (a division of the Special Ulster Constabulary) to his "Free State" family, Traveller Patrick Stokes nevertheless describes Northern Ireland in the first half of the

14. MacMahon, ibid., pp. 101 ; 87. 15. Ciaran Carson, "Travellers", The Ballad of HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, Meath, Ireland, Gallery, 1999, p. 33, lines 1-6. 16. Bettina Barnes, "Irish Travelling People", Gypsies, Tinkers and Other Travellers, Farnham Rehfish éd., London, Academic, 1975, p. 236. 17. Clondalkin Travellers Development Group and Dublin In-Depth Photography, "John Ward's Story", Travellers : A Way of Life, Dublin, Community Arts, 1993, p. 45. 66 Mary BURKE twentieth century as a "a lovely, lovely country" where a Traveller man could "treble the money" he "would get in the Free State [...]" 18. As depicted by MacMahon, Travellers slide easily between the seemingly polarised identities of Northern Ireland : Mickle, Martin's Traveller stepfather, and a former member of the British forces, regales the young man with an anecdote in which his superficial loyalty to the Republic is bought with a pint of beer :

"A fella shook hands with me, an' I comin' out of a pub," Mickle went on. 'You're a loyal servant of the Queen," says he. Me, that turned Republican after I sold me British Army pension ! "A true blue," says he, "so me an' you will scarify the Pope an' then we'll drink the health of King William victor of the Boyne." God forgive me, I drank with him [...] 19.

Although MacMahon implicitly rejects any easy reading of the Traveller as a representative of the subjugated Northern Irish Catholic, Irish cinema appears to have exploited the Traveller figure as a metaphor for betrayed minorities : Martin McLoone states that in Traveller (1981), Neil Jordan's first original screenplay, "the travellers [...] are both the forgotten victims of progress, but can also be read as a metaphor for the dispossessed nationalist people of the North" 2(). Keith Hopper is wary of die elision inherent in the use of Traveller ethnicity "as a metaphor for psychic and political 'Otherness'", which can "function as a liminal way of talking about partition - without ever having to mention it overtly [...]", cautioning that "the harsh conditions faced by Irish Travellers are much more than a convenient cinematic metaphor" 21. Despite the politicisation of Irish Travellers in the latter half of the twentieth-century, the "tinker" or "tinkerish" construction continues to be utilised as a motif of insurrection and a challenge to "Celtic Tiger" values by contemporary dramatists such as Marina Carr and Tom Murphy. In Tom Murphy's The House (2000), the returned emigrant Traveller handyman gains the trust of the minor gentry de Bûrcas, and stealthily gains control of their home. A Castle Rackrent for the

18. Artelia Court et al, Puck of the Droms, pp. 106 ; 104. 19. Bryan MacMahon, The Honey Spike, p. 44. A great many Irish Traveller males enrolled in the British Army during both World Wars. See Travellers : A Way of Life, p. 42. 20. Martin McLoone, "National Cinema and Cultural Identity : Ireland and Europe", Border Crossing : Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, Paul Hainsworth, John Hill and Martin McLoone eds., Institute of Irish Studies with the U of Ulster and BFI, 1994, p. 157. 21. Hopper, Keith, "A Gallous Story and a Dirty Deed' : Word and Image in Neil Jordan and Joe Comerford's Traveller (1981)", Irish Studies Review, 9.2, 2001, p. 190n. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 67

real estate-obsessed "Celtic Tiger" generation, The House is a riposte to the "Big House" motif fixated upon by decades of Irish literary criticism, which set up an exaggerated opposition of Protestant and Catholic, whilst ignoring the post-partition conflict of landed and landless. Nuala Ni DhomhnaiU's unproblematic appropriation of the concept of "tinker" or "white aboriginality" as a revolt against the Irish literary and class establishment22 imbricates long-standing exclusionary Gaelic racial constructs that exoticised the descendants of pre-Gaelic peoples, as "tinkers" were often understood to be by elite commentators 23. Traveller tradition is engulfed by the bi-vocal and ubiquitous Irish discourse of "Catholic" and "Protestant", "nationalist" and "loyalist". Within such differentiating rhetoric, Traveller culture constitutes a "third tradition" that cannot be easily or consistendy identified with either "side" :

Irish people have always had x-ray visions when it comes to gauging the exact co-ordinates within the social galaxy [...]. You either lived in the small professional pocket, the rented private house or, if you were a Prod, [...] the Big House. The lowest animal on the accepted food chain was the council-house dweller. While a grudging mobility between all was allowed, one group remained outside this simplistic little social paradigm. The Travellers 24.

To Revival commentator William Bulfm, Travellers were a "remnant" of pre-Celtic nations to be "differentiate [d] [...] from the Irish people", while Eoin MacNeill considered them "survivals" of the "ancient tribes [that] remained in every part of Ireland after their conquest by the Gaels" 25. Traveller activist Michael McDonagh values

22. "If Lady Gregory came round to me I'd give her all the seanchas she wanted, but in my heart of hearts I'd be thinking [...] how come she's up there with her silk skirt, and I in my bâinin, I would, and how's she better than me ? Now here you have a white aborigine who rejoices in being a white aborigine, who loves the sense I get of undermining all of us [...] I'm something they don't want to be reminded of, that I am well-fleshed and red-haired and high-cheekboned. In the establishment in the south of Ireland, they hate me because I remind them of their tinker ancestry." Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, "Q. & A. : Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill", The Irish Literary Supplement, 6.2, 1987, p. 42. 23. The theory that Travellers issue from a vanquished archaic caste that descends unbroken to this day has become a convention among those writing about the community. See Burke, "'Phoenician Tinsmiths' and 'degenerated Tuatha De Danaari : The Origins and Implications of the Orientalisation of Irish Travellers", The Australian Journal of Irish Studies 2, 2002, pp. 22-34. 24. Daire O'Brien,"Counter March", Agenda, Sunday Business Post, 26 August 2001, p. a2. 25. Bulfin, William, Rambles in Eirinn, 2 vols., 1907 ; London : Sphere, 1981, vol. 2, p. 205 ; MacNeill, Eoin, Phases of Irish History, Dublin : Gill, 1919, p. 82. 68 Mary BURKE

the tradition that links his people to pre-Celtic populations since, if nothing else, it refutes those who, by insisting that the community originates no earlier than the Famine, would construct the Travellers as descendants of recent sedentary dropouts and would deny the community the cultural continuity from which long-standing separate ethnicity might be credibly claimed. The attraction of binding Traveller and pre-Milesian cultures is that it provides, as McDonagh admits, a theory of longstanding presence in Ireland for a minority culture vulnerable to accusations of "merely" recent origin 26. Since the 1970s, a coterie of Traveller writers has begun to chronicle their experiences and to counter the centuries old "tinker" narratives perpetuated by dominant society. Although the earliest written reference to the separateness of Irish "tinker" culture in an official document occurred in 1835 27, the distinct ethnicity of Irish Travellers was only acknowledged in law almost two centuries later. In Britain, the status was granted in 1998 under the Race Relations Act, while in Ireland, recognition came even later, when the Equal Status Act finally defined the community as an ethnic minority in 2000 28. (Nonetheless, the battle for recognition of separate ethnicity within popular discourse remains an uphill struggle : the presumed validity of dominant identity allows it to present itself as a model to which all subordinate Irish ethnicities may be assimilated, while the form of diversity claimed by the Traveller minority is often perceived to be illegitimate 29.) Contrary to the invidious media stereotype of the downtrodden Traveller female, it is the woman's voice that is emerging most vociferously from contemporary Irish Traveller culture. The testaments of Traveller women writers create and reiterate cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, and corrode the

26. McDonagh, Michael, interviewed by author, 28 April 2001. 27. Sharon Gmelch's discovery of references to tinkers in The Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes (1835) is generally understood to be the earliest modern reference to the ethnic category of "tinker", as subsequently recognised. One submission stated that "Ordinary beggars do not become a separate class of the community, but wandering tinkers, families who always beg, do. Three generations of them have been seen begging together." A Mayo informant claimed : "The wives and families accompany the tinker while he strolls about in search of work, and always beg. They intermarry with one another, and form a distinct class." Report of the Commissioners on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, vol. 32, part 1, London, 1835, p. 574 ; vol. 32, part 1, p. 495, quoted in Sharon Gmelch, Tinkers and Travellers, Dublin, O'Brien, 1975, p. 10. 28. Traveller activist David Joyce, personal correspondence, 23 May 2003. 29. John O'Connell, "Ethnicity and Irish Travellers", Irish Travellers : Culture and Ethnicity, May McCann et al eds., Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994, pp. 115-16; Alice Binchy, "Travellers' Language : A Sociolinguistic Perspective", Irish Travellers : Culture and Ethnicity, p. 144. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 69

ostensibly monumental "tinker" construct erected by centuries of sedentary male narrative. The problematic status of Traveller writers as spokespeople for their traditionally non-literate culture is one that cannot be ignored ; many such writers have experienced a degree of education, public standing, or political activism that is unrepresentative of their community. However, it would be patronising and inaccurate to assume that the Traveller response to sedentary constructs has only recently materialised, or that it inevitably emanates from a Traveller elite : a correspondent, who identified him or herself only as an "Irish Gypsy", wrote to The Standard in 1879 praising Victorian moral crusader George Smith's efforts to improve the condition of "fellow-travellers" (Smith was urging Parliament to legislate against Gypsy crime and sloth), but also arguing that the Gypsy was neither morally degraded nor criminally inclined 30. Moreover, Traveller story-telling and balladry constitutes an imaginative and shared resistance to dominant discourse ; the minority's oral tradition subverts, contradicts, transforms and claims narratives emanating from majority culture, as in the following conversation Irish Traveller memoirist Maher had with a teacher at his secondary school :

"[...] some of the stories you tell are different than the ones I heard at home." "And how do you mean 'different' Sean ?" asked Brother Eugene. "Ah, like St. Patrick and that. You never tell about him being a traveller, like I was told on the road." "That is because you have heard a false version," said Brother Eugene. "No, it was not false, it's the one in the school-book that's wrong, because St. Patrick was a travelling man," I replied 31.

The ballad, an art form consistently cherished, claimed, performed and interpreted by non-literate Traveller culture 32, was dismissed as "very defective [...] bombastic, [...] bitter and sectarian [...] Jacobite [...] extravagant and tiresome" by nationalist taste, which judged it to

30. Letter to The Standard 16 Aug. 1879, paraphrased in David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, p. 137. 31. Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, Dublin : Talbot, 1972, p. 117. 32. "Some of their songs are very old and have been passed down through the centuries [...]." Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, p. 34. Likewise, Thomas Acton was informed by a British radio producer that the "Gypsy knowledge of old English ballads now no longer known by the English" suggested that "the Gypsies were more English than the English." Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, p. 46. 70 Mary BURKE

make "no pretence to being true to Ireland" 33. Nevertheless, the emphatic emergence of disparate Traveller voices into the literary scene is an enlightening counter to the weight of the "tinker" canon hitherto forenoted. Irish Traveller writer Juanita Casey exploded onto the literary scene in 1971 with The Horse of Selene, a response to those many male sedentary writers and commentators who have both mythologised and denigrated Ireland's non-mainland and non-sedentary minority populations 34. Although originally published in 1907, Synge's controversial The Tinker's Wedding took sixty-four years to get to the Abbey stage, only reaching it on April 26, 1971, when it was well received by audiences35. The timing of the play's revival was significant : the early 1970s was an era of growing political awareness of the Traveller "problem", during which diverse writings centring on the minority by both sedentary and Traveller authors emerged. Contemporary media discourse revealed a growing awareness of issues pertaining to the community, even if such consciousness was suffused by the rhetoric of "resettlement" and lurid images of "itinerant deprivation". Ultimately, the ubiquitous debate concerning the "itinerant" emerged from the contemporaneous worldwide political mobilisation of the Roma : the International Gypsy Committee organised the First World Romani Congress in 1971, and Irish Traveller representatives - including Nan Joyce - attended the first and subsequent assemblies. Like McDonagh, Nan Joyce might be said to have appropriated the potentially exclusionary discourse of putative "non-Celtic" origin in her transcribed memoir My Life on the Road,, a nuanced analysis of the ambiguous status of Travellers within the contested Northern Irish state. Nan Joyce was born in Tipperary in 1940, but moved to Belfast as a three-year-old, where she eventually became an extremely well known Travellers' rights representative during the 1970s and 1980s. (Nan felt taken advantage of by the media in her heyday, and currently refuses most interviews 36.) Nan's memoir, My Life on the Road, is an

33. Thomas Davis, "The Songs of Ireland", Prose and Poetry, p. 255, quoted in David Lloyd, Anomalous States : Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, Dublin, Lilliput, 1993, pp. 91-92 ; Charles Gavan Duffy, The Ballad Poetry of Ireland, p. xv, quoted in David Lloyd, ibid., p. 92. 34. n 1974, the entwined marginalisation of both populations was underlined by a Mayo Labour Party councillor's suggestion that Travellers be sterilised and then shipped to the Aran Islands. Finlan, Michael, "Wants Itinerants to be Sterilised", Irish Times, 5 Mar. 1974, p. 9. 35. Nicholas Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays, London, Macmillan, 1975, p. 103. 36. Anna Farmar, personal interview, 3 Feb. 2003. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 71

oral account of her life shaped from numerous taped interviews conducted by Anna Farmar. Although the semi-literate Joyce's memoir was mediated to an unavoidable degree by the intervention of Farmar, who transcribed and edited the recordings concerned, Joyce was content that the finished text was a fair representation of her testament. The editor, who holds that she "deliberately absented" herself from the memoir in as much as such is possible, shaped the narrative chronologically : repetition was cut, "but the words are Nan's" 37. Though generally based in Belfast, Nan's family journeyed widely throughout Northern Ireland, and across the sectarian divides of the era : "We travelled around Portadown and Lurgan, to Ballymena and Newry, we travelled all of the North over and over again" 38. Joyce demonstrates a shaded appreciation of the position of Travellers within dominant society ; although the autobiographical voice acknowledges that the Traveller minority is an ethnic group to be differentiated from the majority populations of Northern Ireland ("we're a different- speaking people with our own traditions and our own way of life" 39), its sense of solidarity with the Roman Catholic, Protestant and immigrant working classes subverts the sociological fallacy that the Traveller has nothing in common with her sedentary neighbour :

I think poor is poor : it doesn't matter if you're a Protestant or a Catholic, if you're a black or a white [...]. The people in the Bog Meadows [...] never called us "dirty knackers" or anything like that. We were staying at the back doors of their houses with no water, no toilets, no bin collection, just like today, and still they didn't come out and call us names. They understood because they were poor oppressed people themselves 40.

Although Travellers are subject to mistreatment by the police (her father dies mysteriously while in custody), such experiences are not framed within an easy discourse of sectarian or ethnic conflict, rather one of the subjugation of the underprivileged by the institutions of social control 41. Nonetheless, disregard for the sacred cows of majority identity permeate the Traveller memoir genre, and the minority's oral

37. Ibid. 38. Nan Joyce, My Life on the Road,. Anna Farmar éd., Dublin, Farmar, 2000, p. 40. 39. Nan Joyce, ibid., p. 1. 40. Nan Joyce, ibid., pp. xi, 31. 41. "Some of the police were very hard on us. [...] The women would be trying to cook a bit of food for the children when the police would come and lift the bucket of water and throw it on top of the fire. It was the cruellest thing I ever saw." Nan Joyce, ibid., p. 39. 72 Mary BURKE

history often reveals an alternative version of the past to that sanctioned by official memory. In the following anecdote dictated by Traveller Frank Dunne, the "Black and Tans", anathema to Irish nationalist and republican recollection, are remembered with something akin to affection ; they paid for services provided by the Travelling community, and demonstrated a skewed benevolence and perhaps class solidarity towards the minority, since members were generally drawn from the lowest socio-economic stratum of British society :

The British had sent troops to Ireland to try and make peace [...]. Some of the men in this regiment were very cruel and some were very kind. They used to hold parties and they would ask my parents to play music for them and they would pay [...]. One day [my mother] went to the shops to get food when one of the troops saw her in the butcher's shop [...] he came into the shop and pushed the butcher aside, saying, "I will pay Mrs Dunne with meat for being such a good musician and a very kind person [...]. It's on the house." The butcher was furious, but he could not say anything [ ...] sometimes [the troops] would buy clothes for [my mother's] children but the shopkeeper would not get any money and could say nothing about it because they might shoot him 42.

Nevertheless, Traveller ethnic difference is generally stressed in Joyce's memoir. Despite much commonality with the majority population, a sense of distance from the inter-community conflict, and a seeming lack of allegiance to either "side" figures "the Troubles" as a form of entertaining spectacle to the Belfast minority :

When Protestants and Catholics couldn't get on and they were afeared [afraid] of living side by side they'd move from one area to another. They'd come along to the travellers and say, "Can I have a lend of your lorry ?" The travelling men would go down and move their furniture and whatever they had ; they would spend their evenings helping people to shift. At first in the troubles we were very nervous but then we got used to it, we just walked out on the street where people were rioting and we did our shopping and we weren't afeared. You might stand and look at what's going on and you'd just say "Ah" and walk on. It's like seeing a cowboy picture 43.

Rituals and traditions that were a cause and symptom of conflict are described with palpable affection by Nan, who

42. Clondalkin Travellers Development Group and Dublin In-Depth Photography, "Frank Dunne's Story", Travellers: A Way of Life, p. 33. 43. Nan Joyce, op. cit., p. 76. IRISH TRAVELLER IDENTITY AS "THIRD SPACE" 73 perceives that the minority occupied a somewhat neutral position in the bifurcated city of Belfast :

One Twelfth of July I went down to Sandy Row with [my brother] Willie and we were all day watching the Orangemen marching and listening to the music. I had a skipping rope and I'd go skipping along beside them while they were marching. [...] growing up we heard about the Orangemen being bad but they never did anything to us, I suppose they knew we were travellers the way we were dressed. The Protestant side of the Bog Meadows [where Nan's family had camped] had a bonfire and they [...] set this thing alight. It was like a scarecrow and it was supposed to be the Pope 44.

In exploring the detachment of Travellers from the political concerns of sedentary society, North and South, and in depicting Cant being spoken by Traveller characters, MacMahon 's revolutionary Honey Spike acknowledged that the community constituted a cultural and ethnic minority on the island. Furthermore, MacMahon 's depiction of the manipulation of Travellers by republican representatives is perceptive : Joyce suggests that, historically, Travellers' perceived indifference to hostilities occurring around them was exploited by "the old IRA", who used the minority to smuggle guns because "travellers [...] wouldn't be searched." 45 The Traveller's apparent ability to skirt around the fixed poles of Northern Irish identity and allegiance is physically enacted in forced geographical movement that intersect community divisions : "We used to be hunted out of the Bog Meadows. We'd go from the Catholic side to the Protestant side, then to the Falls Road, up to Andersonstown, out the Hollywood Road, up the Glengormley Road, the White Rock and the Show [sic] Road" 46. It should be noted that Joyce's memoir centres on the period preceding "the Troubles" ; certain research indicates that Travellers were increasingly labelled as "nationalist" or "Catholic" in the wake of the decisive eruption of sectarian tensions, although the identification was not always inevitable, and rarely asserted by the Travellers themselves 47.

44. Ibid., p. 32. 45. Ibid., p. 26. 46. Ibid., p. 39. "Show Road" is very likely to be an incorrect transcription of Shore Road, Belfast. 47. "Given the distinctive 'brogue' that is spoken by many Travellers, a number of people identify them with the republic of Ireland and view them as 'runners' [...] they claim that the Travellers have no place in our towns [...]. Travellers are at least nominally viewed as 'Catholics' and their 'brogue' defines them as Irish. It is sometimes said that the 'South' should deal with its own problem and not export it 'up North'. [...] naked 74 Mary BURKE

Both MacMahon and Joyce stake a claim in a "third space" of Northern Irish identity, negotiating the bi-vocal and ubiquitous discourse of "Catholic" and "Protestant", "nationalist" and "loyalist", and answering in the affirmative Paul Delaney's question as to "whether it is possible to recognise and depict another culture as also Irish." 48 In refuting the fixed identities offered by Northern Irish society, and in embracing fluidity and ambiguity, Joyce and MacMahon might be said to have circuitously appropriated the potentially exclusionary discourse of the Traveller as internal exile.

sectarian prejudice [...] is from time to time aimed at the Traveller population. This sectarian factor is present and may be seen to be reflected in the voting patterns at Local Council meetings when the 'itinerant problem' is raised. While the sectarian factor is present [...] it is in no way cut and dried. 'Unionists' have helped Travellers and some will take the more positive of attitudes [...] while some 'Nationalists' are seen to just as bigoted and biased against Travellers as it is possible to be." Cathal Butler, Travelling People in Derry and Tyrone, Derry, World Development Group, 1985, p. 20. 48. Paul Delaney, "Representations of the Travellers in the 1880s and 1900s", Irish Studies Review, 9.1, 2001, p. 65.