Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Irish Travellers: An Exploration in Criticism and Fiction Author(s) Holmes, Mary Patricia Publication Date 2012-09-28 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/3557 Downloaded 2021-09-28T03:13:30Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Irish Travellers: An Exploration in Criticism and Fiction Mary Patricia Holmes This dissertation is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisor: Dr John Kenny School of Humanities Department of English National University of Ireland, Galway September 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements. ............................................................................................ i Abstract……………………………………………………………………… .. ii Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 SECTION I Chapter 1 Socio-Cultural History ................................................................. 7 Chapter 2 Ideologies of Representation ..................................................... 22 A. Photography ........................................................................... 23 B. Television and Film ................................................................ 28 C. Literature and Drama .............................................................. 43 Chapter 3 Shelta, Orality and the Representation of Ideology ................... 54 A. Third-Person Omniscience: The Honey Spike ......................... 63 B. First-Person: Paveewhack ...................................................... 70 C. Dramatic Dialogue: A Whistle in the Dark ............................. 77 SECTION II Run Over: A Draft of a Novel .................................................................. 93 SECTION III Reflections on Research and Practice.. .................................................. 233 Bibliography .................................................................................................... 252 Acknowledgements During the course of this work my mother was diagnosed with a serious illness and had to be placed in a care institution in Toronto. She has been a consistent support throughout my life and this work would not have been possible without her love and selflessness. On top of her many wonderful maternal qualities, she encouraged me and my brothers and sisters to make stories, to dream and always to dance. I am forever grateful to her for her dreams and her love. Thank you to my uncle, Dr James Walsh, and my brother Andrew and his family who have all generously encouraged me. Thank you to my wonderful friends for their advice, support and faith, in particular: Celine Horner and Colin Kelleher, who believed in me even when I’d lost hope; Paul Gleeson, who through his own example has helped me to be courageous; Kate O’Boyle without whose support and gentle guidance I would not have finished; Ciara Griffin and Rebecca Downes for their continual and reliable friendship and last minute help; Leo Keohane, whose immense generosity, kindness and intellectual engagement have enabled me to become more kind, critical and focused in my anger; and to Fathers Diarmuid Hogan and Patrick O’Donohue, Alice-Mary and all the Higgins family for their kindness, advice and assistance. Professionally, thank you to James Ryan, Harry Clifton, Mark Haugaard, Adrian Frazier, John McAuliffe, the James Hardiman Library staff and to the BA CONNECT programme who funded this work for four years with a generous fellowship. To John Kenny, who may have got more than he bargained for in supervising me, thank you for your patience, kindness and solidity. Your creative, intellectual and professional guidance has been most appreciated. And a final thank you to my young nieces, Felicia and Helena Holmes, who at the time of this writing are on the cusp of adolescence and whose confidence, intelligence, curiosity, compassion and exuberance inspire me and fill me with great love and hope. It is to them, and to my mother, that this work is dedicated. i Abstract This dissertation examines the construction of the Irish Traveller character in fiction. Traveller marginalisation has been perpetuated in literature through stereotypical representation and subjugation of their world-view. This thesis aims to investigate the predominant Irish Traveller stereotypes in art and fiction, and the strategies for innovative representations. This study is tripartite: discursive, creative and reflective. The discursive section provides an overview of Traveller culture and a history of relations between the group and the settled community in order to explore how representations have evolved for better or worse. Representations within photography, film and literature present an overview of the dominant depictions of Travellers in popular culture; these include the victim, the fool and the criminal. Depictions that engage the Traveller perspective or world-view are rare. Using a stylistics approach, three innovative representations, Bryan MacMahon’s The Honey Spike, Peter Brady’s Paveewhack and Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark are analysed to reveal the choices these respective writers have made A particular focus is placed on the Travellers’ specific argot, Shelta, and the oral nature of their community. Section II of this thesis is the creative application of the best of these ideas in a draft of a novel entitled Run Over. The intention is to create a polyphonic chorus of voices, in which the Traveller voice is equal among many. Section III is a reflective essay, which chronicles the interaction of the critical and creative work throughout this Ph.D. The praxis orientation of this work fosters the interaction of critical and creative work, cultivating inquiry, awareness and innovation. ii Introduction Praxis, the interaction of theory and practice, is the fundamental motivation of a practice-based Ph.D. dissertation. The structure of a practice-based Ph.D. takes its shape from a question (or a problem) emerging from a creative work, which becomes the basis for an academic research project, whose findings then feed back into the creative construction. How these processes relate is important, and in the third section of this thesis a reflective essay details these interactions. Together the discursive, creative and reflective sections of this thesis explore the construction of a three-dimensional Irish Traveller character in long fiction. Irish Travellers are a semi-nomadic oral community who choose to remain separate from the settled (non-Traveller) community. Currently the accepted term by which to denote the group is Traveller, but many people still refer to ‘tinkers’ or ‘itinerants’. As of 2010, the Traveller population was estimated at 40,000 in the Republic and Northern Ireland. For many, inadequate housing, poor living conditions and poverty contribute to low life expectancy. Infant mortality and suicide rates are also high. Beyond these physical concerns and perhaps because of them the group is marginalised within Irish society. Their lifestyle choices, which are often the antithesis of contemporary settled society’s objectives, have separated them from the wider community. How exactly the group came to be a separate community is unknown, but there is evidence that this separation has been intact for at least two hundred years. All the while, the relationship between the Traveller and the settled community has been coloured with animosity and suspicion. Common depictions of Travellers in the media and art include that they are dirty, diseased, illiterate, violent and misogynistic.1 This has been the framework for relations between the Traveller and settled communities and has besieged Traveller representations. The majority of Traveller characters in literature have been minor and typecast on the wrong side of typical oppositions such as good and evil, victim and perpetrator, love and hate. These depictions rely on structural conventions that 1 Kevin Myers, ‘I’m Irish, I Know About the Gipsy Problem,’ The Telegraph 3 Oct. 2004, Web, 14 Nov. 2008 < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3611584/Im-Irish-I-know-about-the-gipsy-problem.html>. 1 invoke social and cultural stereotypes from the world outside the text and reinforce the audience’s expectations. Audience expectations were at the heart of the Abbey Theatre’s decision to reject JM Synge’s 1907 drama The Tinker’s Wedding. The directors of the Abbey thought that the play was too dangerous and that Irish audiences were not ready for the controversial plot in which the despised ‘tinkers’ outwit a Catholic priest. Although the play was first produced on 11 November 1909 in London, it was not until the 1960s that The Tinker’s Wedding was performed in Ireland by an amateur theatre company and only in April of 1971 did it debut at the Abbey Theatre, sixty- four years after initial publication. Synge’s representations found meaning and purpose in new and unsettling ways to re-present, and in doing so challenged both literary and social expectations and conventions. As in Synge’s time, Traveller representations today are essentially a struggle between archetype and innovation on one side and stereotype and repetition on another. Many depictions of Travellers in the popular media rehash similar ideas, which include the thug, the scapegoat, the victim and the fool: essentially highly