|
Travelling People in Ireland have their own culture, language and way of life but racist treatment by governments and settled people forces them to live as outcasts in third world conditions on the margins of society. Travellers speak out to demand their rights as an ethnic minority.
Northern Visions have produced the documentary both north and south of the border in close co-operation with Traveller activists including Nan Joyce, Chrissie Ward, Michael and Nell McDonagh, Mary Slattery, and the Dublin Travellers Education and Development Group.
"I think people have to understand that there is an awful amount of prejudice and racism against Travelling people. Irish people have to start off and find that they are racist in that sense against Travelling people and the sooner that they identify that, then I think that something more constructive can be done about it."
(Michael McDonagh, Traveller and community worker)
"If there is going to be any improvement in the situation we need Travellers out there as leaders, we need Travellers being articulate on the media, we need Travellers to protest, we need Travellers to organise themselves."
(Martin Collins, Dublin Travellers Education and Development Group)
"The conditions here are really awful because the things you would find in the third world you would find in here, like children with chest infections, gastro-enteritis, diarrhoea and kidney infections - And it's just because they're Traveller children they're allowed to live like that."
(Nan Joyce)
"They never provided a place for the scrap so they just want the men to hang around all day, be bored to death hanging around….. Then the settlers come along and say 'Oh look at the dirt, look at the scrap at the side of the road. We want them out of there.' Then they move the Travellers on somewhere else, we move to another place and the same thing happens to us in that area.… and then when we want to have a talk with Settled people and try to sort things out they're just not prepared to listen. If they could only just listen to the Travellers it would solve an awful lot of problems."
(Chrissie Ward)
"Travellers having to sign on… on Thursday mornings at half eleven, Travellers only, nation-wide, both north and south of the border. I mean that is a very obvious example of institutional racism where it is actually enshrined into our laws, when it says that Travellers must sign on at such a place on such a day at such a place. I find that very hard to accept and in a lot of ways it would be similar to apartheid in South Africa and we often refer to it as apartheid Irish style."
(Martin Collins)
Broadcast Channel 4 1991. Radio Telefis Eireann 1991. Central Soviet Television 1991. Edinburgh Fringe Film Festival 1991.
|
|
