Room to Roam England's Irish Travellers
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E N G LA N D’S IRISH TRAVE LL E R S Room to Roam England's Irish Travellers Dr Colm Power Report of Research Funded by the Community Fund June 2004 1 ROOM TO ROA M Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people and organisations all of whom have provided me with assistance, advice, support or other positive contributions without which it would have been much more difficult to develop, plan, execute and complete the research and write the report. I take full responsibility for the content of the final report. The project research team including fieldworkers Anthony Drummond, Patricia Twomey and Jane Whittle who all contributed data and knowledge to this report. Dr Jane Longmore, former head of the History, Social and Cultural Studies department at St. Mary’s College, who actively supported me throughout the development and submission of the original research bid to the Community Fund, and the numerous people who gave advice on the bid content. The staff and management committee of Action Group for Irish Youth (AGIY) who lead the research bid consortium and managed the overall project. The staff of Brent Irish Advisory Service Irish Travellers Project (BIAS ITP) who joined the research consortium and facilitated much of the fieldwork. The staff of Irish Community Care Manchester’s Irish Traveller Project who became associate members of the research consortium and facilitated much of the fieldwork. The staff of St. Mary’s College (the third research consortium member) who managed the actual research project and provided the researchers with academic support. These staff included Dr. John Ince, Professor John Fulton and Ms. Julie Humphries among others. All the staff of community groups and agencies that supported the research and contributed to the data collection process in numerous ways including participation in interviews and facilitating access to institutions and people. All the members of the research steering group established to advise and support the research project and its research team. Ms. Joan Taylor for her personal and emotional support Martin Naughton, Professor Joe Sim, Ms. Mary Tilki and AGIY whose comments were very helpful on various drafts of the research report. All the research respondents, and particularly the large number of Irish Travellers in England who contributed greatly to this research in the way of informal conversations and advice, in-depth interviews and focus groups. And finally the Community Fund for commissioning the research from my initial research bid and for providing the grant that funded the research and the report’s publication. Dr. Colm Power 2 E N G LA N D’S IRISH TRAVE LL E R S Contents Title Contents Acknowledgements Key to referencing system 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Who are Irish Travellers? 1.2 Traveller demographics 1.3 Select review of literature 1.4 Travellers and assimilation in twentieth century Britain 1.5 The mediation of anti-Irish Traveller racism 1.6 Particularly vulnerable sections of the Irish Traveller population 1.7 Aims and Objectives of Research 1.8 Research Brief 1.9 Summary and comments 2. ACCOMMODATION AND ECONOMY 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Legal background to Travellers’ accommodation situation 2.3 The current legal situation 2.4 LA sites: Barry Site in Gander Borough 2.5 Site management by LA coercion 2.7 Travellers and the settled Irish community in Britain 2.8 Homeless Travellers and housing 2.9 Fleeing domestic violence 2.10 Plots, planning and sedentarism 2.11 Illegal Irish Traveller encampments 2.12 Traveller economies 2.13 Summary and comments 3. HEALTH AND SOCIAL WELFARE 3.1 Introduction 3.2 PCTs: The new primary healthcare regime 3.3 Healthcare access for Irish Travellers 3.4 Irish Traveller family’s healthcare 3.5 Family access to secondary and specialist healthcare in hospitals 3.6 Environmental health 3.7 Traveller men’s health 3.8 Mental health 3.9 Social Services Departments (SSDs) and Irish Travellers 3.10 Homeless Traveller children and SSDs 3.11 SSDs that work for Travellers? 3.12 Summary and comments 4. TRAVELLERS’ EDUCATION AND TRAINING 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Education support for Travellers 4.3 LENC, Painham and Gander Traveller education delivery perspectives 4.4 Irish Traveller’s under-achievement and absence in LA and RC schools 4.5 Excluding Travellers from schooling 4.6 Secondary Education and Training 4.7 Summary and comments 5. POLICING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Policing Irish Travellers in SEEM and LENC 5.3 Operational policing and Irish Travellers 5.4 Police diversity training and Irish Travellers 3 ROOM TO ROA M 5.5 Community Policing and Irish Travellers 5.6 Irish Travellers in the Criminal Justice System 5.7 Youth Offender Teams (YOTs) and youth justice 5.8 Dealing with complex Irish identities 5.9 Good YOT practice with Travellers 5.10 Probation pre-sentence reports (PSRs) and sentence outcomes for Travellers 5.11 LENC Probation Service responses 5.12 Travellers’ Prison experiences 5.13 Summary and comments 6. RECOMMENDATIONS 6.1 Ethnic Monitoring Key 6.2 Key strategic recommendations 6.3 General recommendations 6.4 Central and Local Government (and associated agencies) 6.5 Voluntary and Statutory sector support 6.6 Accommodation and economy 6.7 PCTs, GP Surgeries and Hospital Trusts recommendations 6.8 Social Services Departments (SSDs) 6.8.1 Other Services 6.9 Education and Training 6.10 The Criminal Justice System and Travellers 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY Books, Articles, Reports and Websites 8. APPENDICES Appendix I: Background to the Research Project Appendix II: Historical background to nomadism in Europe Appendix III: Primary research respondents’ background and competences Appendix IV: Main organisations and research locations in report Appendix V: List of primary research respondents referred to by name in report Appendix VI: Data collection methods and reflections on their practice Appendix VII: Using appropriate research methodologies 9. KEY TO REFERENCING SYSTEM All academic references are given in this text using the Harvard system: author, year of publication and page numbers where appropriate in curved brackets, eg. (Power, 1990: 24). Primary research interview material is differentiated in this text from other references by the particular respondents’ assumed name or description and the year the interview was conducted in square brackets, eg. [Irish Traveller 2002]. All quotes taken from primary and secondary sources are indicated by the use of ‘italicized’ text. Interviews were edited to remove extraneous material in order to make the interviews more readable (digestable) and to accentuate pertinent passages. Interviewers’ questions have been removed where they are superfluous or detract from the research respondents’ narrative – where interviewers’ questions are included in italicized respondents narratives they are rendered in ‘normal’ print type. Comments in square brackets, eg. ‘[sic]’, contained in either research interview quotes or secondary quotes are the report author’s own comments. 4 E N G LA N D’S IRISH TRAVE LL E R S 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Who are Irish Travellers? This brief historical perspective outlines recent Irish Traveller migration to Britain and explains the social, legal and administrative contexts that impact on Travellers’ lives underlining the necessity for this research report. Irish Travellers refer to themselves as ‘Pavees’ or ‘Minceir’. They are an indigenous nomadic minority group in Ireland (south and north) and Britain.(1) They have been part of Irish and British society for many centuries according to historical sources (McDonagh and McVeigh, 1996; Fraser, 1992). Irish Travellers’ distinctive way of life, values, culture and traditions manifest themselves in Traveller ‘nomadism’, the centrality of the extended family, their own language or ‘secret patois’, and the entrepreneurial nature of their economy (Ó Riain, 1997; LIWC, 1995; McCann et al, 1994). Irish Travellers, and indeed other Traveller groups, do not form discrete or homogenous ethnic categories in the sense that suit sedentary institutions and bureaucracies that tend to compartmentalise in order to generalise, but they can be better understood from without as ‘a community of communities’ (Parekh, 2000: 34). The extended family (or tribe) is the central organising unit while alliances (or disputes) within particular groups or with other extended families form the bonds or demarcations that link and divide these groups in a more general sense. Many Irish Travellers still speak their language known as ‘Gammon’ or ‘Cant’ – a combination of ‘disguised’ Irish and English words that uses English language syntax and sentence structure (Binchy, 1994). Irish Travellers use Cant/Gammon in conjunction with English and are sometimes very reluctant to divulge it to outsiders. Travellers use the language within their own community and in the presence of settled people in certain situations (ibid). Travellers have also played a significant role in maintaining aspects of Irish culture such as music and storytelling, and have helped to reinvigorate aspects of the struggling folk music tradition in Britain. Rural settled people often welcomed Irish Travellers as a source of news, entertainment, consumer goods and as flexible seasonal agricultural workers before the advent of mass media, consumerism and telecommunications. They filled vital niches in the economy of pre-industrialised Ireland and parts of rural Britain up to the 1950s as they bartered, sold and recycled scarce consumer commodities. Historically, Irish Travellers have been employed in horse trading, seasonal farm-work, rural crafts, selling domestic goods door-to-door (hawking), and as tinsmiths and tradesmen. Many Traveller extended families had established regular migratory patterns that often stretched beyond national boundaries to sustain their lifestyle. One example of an Irish Traveller family (consisting of about thirty members) migratory pattern in the early 1950s was to cross from Ireland to north Wales for Spring lambing, then travel and work through the English Midlands to eventually reap the harvest in rural Lancashire.