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Irish Bob, while I am, guilty-as-charged, a fully paid-up member of the Guardian-reading liberal chattering classes (I think my previous posts on these forum make that obvious), your accusation that I have had no contact whatsoever with any Irish travellers is not exactly true.
As I child we always had a few of them in our school. They were generally marginalised and bullied by the other kids, and ignored by the teachers. They never stayed longer than a term. Once I remember being taken to one of their encampments on the outskirts of Cambridge - and even aged 8 or 9 being shocked at the squalor and poverty of the camp. It made a lasting impression on me.
As an adult I have never met a Traveller who wasn't extremely courteous and polite. An acquiantance who works in local government tells me that they get tonnes of referrels from social services, schools and GPs about Traveller communities, but that in reality their communities and families are the some of the most cohesive and resilient around with lower instances of alcholism, drug addiction and abuse than in the general population. So my opinion is not based entirely on what I read in the left-wing press.
I include the extreme bigoted comment as an example of how it is far more socially acceptable in modern Britain to be racist against Irish Travellers than against any other type of minority. I am by no means suggesting you yourself engage in such hate-filled banter.
However I would make the same accusation back at you, that you perhaps know little of the Traveller community, and have based your opinion on what you read/watch in the right-wing press?
@MOS - And no, I don't know any Travellers with a university degree. I dare say there are some, though probably a far fewer proportion than in the general population.
anyone who thinks travellers are courteous and polite as a rule and also less prone to alcoholism , knows as much about travellers as arabs do about igloos
I'll guarantee one thing.
Any person on here with any notion about Travellers being an oppressed minority or suffering unfair abuse at the hands of the general population would very rapidly change their minds if they were to park their caravan outside your house.
You'd be singing a very different tune in no time at all.
And it wouldn't be around a campfire having your fortune told by Gypsy Rose Lee.
Man I love seing Liberals waking up to reality slapping them around the face.
Here's my thing. You don't have to go very far (in fact, you don't have to leave City-Data) to hear similar rants from cranky old farts in Arizona about my folk. "Yeearrrghhh!!! They come here and they do this and they do that and they're nothing but third world trash wharrrrrgarrrrrrrrllllll derp derp derp!!!" And yes, they also repeat the "you don't live down here so you can't say anything" line. It's almost like MadLibs where you can fill in the blanks.
Funny thing is, for the most part these farty old cranks aren't Arizona whites who have been there for generations, these are snowbird retirees from the Rust Belt. Anyone ever seen Gran Torino? They're like Clint Eastwood's character minus the change of heart, and they go from ranting about the blacks and Cambodians back in Detroit to ranting about the Mexicans down in Arizona. I guess they're mad because the retirement community brochures didn't warn them enough? At any rate, there are now enough of them to do real harm against real people, and not just illegals but brown people in general. Anybody who tells you it's just about the illegals and nothing more is naive at best, outright lying at worst, and is most likely being disingenuous. To themselves in a lot of cases, not just to you. The legal/native-born Mexican-American population in Arizona is politically apathetic and hasn't done much to defend itself, but they're big enough to be a 'sleeping giant.' Give it a decade or so and the tide will turn.
For the record, I'm not against the prevention of illegal border crossing, and I'm not against sealing up the border tighter than a gnat's ***** so that when a tortoise crosses it we know about it. But what these Arizona people are doing is like trying to fix leaky pipes by taking a nine pound hammer to the walls. There are solutions that don't involve stupidly steamrolling right over both the guilty and the innocent. If you disregard the rest of my wordy post, don't disregard this bit.
Yes, yes, I know... apples and oranges. But I do not like seeing a minority, however dubious their status or origins, being stepped on. And I would have thought that the Irish would be a little more hesitant to do so. You were at the absolute bottom of the heap for so many years, treated like subhuman trash on both sides of the Atlantic. The cartoons may have been "ancient" but you can dig up Tory rants from the 60s and 70s that aren't too far off, and it wasn't just old men going on about something, it had real consequences. Hell, the anti-Catholicism almost cost Kennedy the Presidency. As far as the Travelers and the real problems they present (yes, I fully admit they're real), I'm not saying the Travelers shouldn't be subjected to the laws of the land, I'm just a little concerned about how one would go about doing the "subjecting" if you know what I mean. This is a valid concern that none of you seem to give a toss about. Just send in the coppers to crack heads, right?
This is OT, but I am half-Italian, half English(?) and I have never encountered Italian-Americans in my area of Mississippi behaving like that. Maybe that's because our ancestors migrated from northern Italy, which is very different culturally from southern Italy and Sicily. Also, we aren't influenced by the "guido" culture of the northeastern U.S.
I live in the north. The far north. I once ran the bit about the movie mafiosi by a group of friends here and they just shrugged and wondered why I thought it would be any different. It was like asking a fish what being in water is like. If anything, Catholicism is stronger down south than it is up here, at least as a cultural force.
To be sure, things were different back in the old days. Young men could play around but young women sure couldn't. (Which is how it works with many Muslim communities today!) Aside from certain rural enclaves, mostly down south, those days are gone.
The Mafia isn't so much a thing this far north, aside from crooked coat-and-tie business types. (As to what exactly they're up to, I couldn't tell you.)
I lived in Las Vegas for a number of years and know its history better than most (which isn't saying much). Both the main Catholic church and the main Synagogue were built by the mob. In the 80s when they finally started cracking down on the mob, the new local FBI head tried to join the synagogue and was refused. To quote Joe Pesci from Casino (whose character was based on Tony the Ant), "back in Chicago we'd get indicted. Here you get a civic award!" Heck, the Sunrise Children's Hospital was built by Moe Dalitz, a man everyone seems to remember fondly, including the old retired cops. To be sure, today the vast majority of the congregations have nothing to do with any of that. Aside from strip joints and a few other ventures the mob in Vegas is a thing of the past. Their kids went to law school and now work for the major corporations that now control Vegas.
I used to know a guy from that community. He went on to be a career officer in the British army. He told some crazy stories about his childhood. The worst was whenever the cops would raid their camps with the express purpose of taking away all the children in order to place them all in foster care. He and the other kids would have about 5 to 20 minutes notice to run like hell and hide in the woods, and the adults would tell the cops "oh, but there are no children here." They would reunite with the caravan later at a predetermined spot, but sometimes it took as long as two weeks for them to catch up. They would scavenge in the meantime, a carrot here and a potato there, while trying to evade detection. They were trained practically from toddlerhood in what can be called SERE tactics, so it's not like they were thrust out there as helpless babes, but... wow. Just wow.
This is why I am concerned as to 'the how' when it comes to matters of imposing law and order.
European racism against the Romani is appalling, going off of what I've seen here in Italy. A couple years ago down in Naples, a bunch of people from the city raided a gypsy camp in a vigilante action. Guys on scooters ran them down swinging tire irons and their entire camp was burnt to the ground. Firefighters tried to put out the flames and they kept restarting the fires. It all happened because of a rumor, which turned out to be false, that a gypsy girl had attempted to kidnap a baby from an open window.
It was horrifying. It was like the 1920s blackshirts all over again. Americans think Berlusconni is cute and funny with his bunga bunga parties but he was the worst thing to happen to Italy since the end of the war. It wasn't just his shenanigans, he seriously screwed the whole country. At any rate, this kind of thing was par for the course because he had empowered the previously marginalized far right in order to fatten his coalition. Berlusconni also tried to pass a law--not sure if it went through--where all gypsies would have to be fingerprinted and registered at police stations, all the way down to five year old children.
Yes, I understand that squatter camps and pickpocketing ought not be given a pass. But the solutions quite often end up being worse than the problem.
When I lived in Ireland, they were called "Tinkers". They were considered by the family I was staying with as sort of Gypsies.
Tinkers is a fairly old-fashioned term rarely used and comes from a time when gypsies were more lovable rogues that the drug-dealing violent criminals that many of them are now.
Today they are universally known as knackers.
When I lived in Ireland, they were called "Tinkers". They were considered by the family I was staying with as sort of Gypsies.
i usually refer to them as tinkers
the term is a no no for the pc police however
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