More Travellers Tales

BlaasForRafa

demonspawn wrote: »

Interesting. We were laying paving bricks on 4-6 inches of compressed gravel. Not really sure how we were ripping anyone off, unless the men I was working for were charging extortionate prices but I honestly can't say one way or the other. But hey, it's always been the Irish way to rip off as many people as you can. Our shopkeepers and landlords will agree. So now that we've established that neither you nor Blaas actually know for certain about who I was working for and what I was doing, let's just leave it at that.

It seems you base you opinions on sensationalized newspaper articles, not surprising really. You should try going out into the real world and experience these things for yourself before you pass judgment so easily.

I don't particularly care what the experience of ONE person on boards is. Maybe you were with the ONE crew of honest travellers that exists out there. You have established NOTHING except for your own rose-tinted view of travellers, However there are more experiences of dishonest travellers than your SINGULAR experience.

Perhaps you should go out and get more experience and you would see that the majority of traveller tarmac gangs are con-artists.

Spudmonkey

nuac wrote: »

The driveway job is a common traveller scam in the West of Ireland.

A family member of mine was burnt by them years ago with this scam, I also know of several such scams in a suburb of Limerick city where retired people were also targeted with shoddy jobs.

Another such scam was where a local farmer had one shower install a set of gates and a couple of weeks later another lot came around to ''automate'' them. They promptly took the gates and were never seen again.

Perhaps it's innocence on these peoples part. If they are so gullible, they deserve to be taken for a ride (which I don't agree with for one second). just don't tell me these are isolated incidents. I've heard far too many stories for this to be the case.

Spudmonkey

demonspawn wrote: »

Defend the Church all you want, (which says a lot about you as a person btw) we all know the truth now. Every church in this country should be burnt to the ground and every priest sent packing to Rome imo.

You don't want to hear generalisations about one faction of society yet you are quite prepared to make them about another. Hardly an impartial opinion now is it??

irishh_bob

another tinker scam revolves around painting farm buildings , baschically , the tinkers use a 9:1 ratio of diesel to paint , many farmers ( including my own brother ) have been conned by this trick , my brother could be forgiven for being taken in as the tinkers in question were advertised as a legitimite painting contractor firm in the farmers journal , the add stated that they provided a seven year guarentee , seven second guarentee more like , anyhow , the paint was gone off the sheds in about six months

demonspawn

BlaasForRafa wrote: »

I don't particularly care what the experience of ONE person on boards is. Maybe you were with the ONE crew of honest travellers that exists out there. You have established NOTHING except for your own rose-tinted view of travellers, However there are more experiences of dishonest travellers than your SINGULAR experience.

Perhaps you should go out and get more experience and you would see that the majority of traveller tarmac gangs are con-artists.

So what's YOUR personal experience of being ripped off by travelers? Because I'm sick to death of hearing people bitch and moan about something that really has nothing to do with them in the first place.

demonspawn

Spudmonkey wrote: »

You don't want to hear generalisations about one faction of society yet you are quite prepared to make them about another. Hardly an impartial opinion now is it??

You mean when that one faction of society are meant to be moral and ethical leaders of their community? Gimme a break.

Aidan1

Whatever about the scams and fraud that goes on, the outright theft of equipment in rural areas is an even more serious problem.

Everything from diesel to power tools to gates to farm machinery goes missing, and has done for years. Logically, not all of it is conducted by the travelling community, but both court proceedings and anecdotal evidence suggests that a vast proportion of it is.

murphaph

Aidan1 wrote: »

Whatever about the scams and fraud that goes on, the outright theft of equipment in rural areas is an even more serious problem.

Everything from diesel to power tools to gates to farm machinery goes missing, and has done for years. Logically, not all of it is conducted by the travelling community, but both court proceedings and anecdotal evidence suggests that a vast proportion of it is.

So would it be fair to say that perhaps the "travelling community" use their nomadic status as a cover to allow them to travel the length and breadth of Ireland (and further afield) to commit crime? I think it would. It's hard to track them down when they have no fixed abode and half the time drive foregin (UK) registered vehicles.

Spudmonkey

demonspawn wrote: »

You mean when that one faction of society are meant to be moral and ethical leaders of their community? Gimme a break.

So because travellers don't fit that mantle they are entitled to a free pass?? The fact remains, you don't want generalisations made about one faction of society while you do about another!

Laminations

The problem here is that some people maintain (and they may be wholly correct) that we have a case of 'under-utilisation of base rate information' (Fiske and Taylor, 1991) with travellers. That is, we have generalisations where individual, vivid, single or a small number of examples are taken to represent the behaviour of an entire group. This can happen quite easily where anecdotal evidence is relied upon. The issue becomes then 'what is the base rate?' , we do not have proper information, we don't have a quantification of this. It does appear from this thread that it is not a 'small number of examples' from which people are generalising (the ratio of bad experience posts to good experience posts is very uneven) but each poster is possibly generalising from a vivid bad personal experience.

We need statistics.
What percentage of travellers have been charged or convicted?
What percentage of settled people have been charged or convicted?
What percentage of settled long term unemployed have been charged or convicted?
Etc.

Statistics will tease apart the confounding factors, such as educational standards, employment history, minority membership which all overlap with being a traveller. We need the proper monitoring of traveller behaviour (not in an Orwellian kind of way) but just enough as to get useful information. 'No fixed abode' really doesn't work well for government records. We need base rate information

FTA69

BlaasForRafa wrote: »

Thats because Travellers working on drives are inherantly pulling a scam.

They aren't though, no more than every Nigerian salesman is trying to blag your credit card details. There are plenty of honest Traveller tarmacers, roofers, painters, tree-toppers etc out there. Are there Traveller con-men out there? Definitely. Would I contract a few random Travellers who showed up on my door? No chance. Does that equate with every Traveller workman being an "inherent" conman? No it doesn't.

BlaasForRafa

Laminations wrote: »

The problem here is that some people maintain (and they may be wholly correct) that we have a case of 'under-utilisation of base rate information' (Fiske and Taylor, 1991) with travellers. That is, we have generalisations where individual, vivid, single or a small number of examples are taken to represent the behaviour of an entire group. This can happen quite easily where anecdotal evidence is relied upon. The issue becomes then 'what is the base rate?' , we do not have proper information, we don't have a quantification of this. It does appear from this thread that it is not a 'small number of examples' from which people are generalising (the ratio of bad experience posts to good experience posts is very uneven) but each poster is possibly generalising from a vivid bad personal experience.

We need statistics.
What percentage of travellers have been charged or convicted?
What percentage of settled people have been charged or convicted?
What percentage of settled long term unemployed have been charged or convicted?
Etc.

Statistics will tease apart the confounding factors, such as educational standards, employment history, minority membership which all overlap with being a traveller. We need the proper monitoring of traveller behaviour (not in an Orwellian kind of way) but just enough as to get useful information. 'No fixed abode' really doesn't work well for government records. We need base rate information

You're quite right but if you did try and get information on travellers of that type you'd have the Pavee Point types and Equality Authority types up in arms because you're "persecuting" travellers and interfering with "their culture"

rodento

Seems to be more outrage to a daily mail article than to the smashing of the legs of John joe Nevin

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/daily-mail-column-on-travellers-criticised-by-equality-authority-1.1754911

At least she defends herself

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/once-its-what-you-want-to-hear-youre-all-for-it-brenda-power-defends-controversial-traveller-article-30170857.html

rodento

You can read the article here

http://www.broadsheet.ie/2014/04/08/truth-to-power/

laoch na mona

just dont be racist and it'll be okay

Eggy Baby!

Come to Navan and see the glory of daily traveller culture and life (all thirty years of it).

Crime is a too often a foregone conclusion for the future of a traveller, considering their lives of deliberate poverty and seclusion from society. I try to be PC, I really do, but I'm afraid my viewpoint has developed out of actual firsthand, concrete experience with travellers.

No culture is inferior to another, but some cultures just don't gel well with others.

vellakare

I suspect trouble and the problem with any post mentioning this particular minority community on boards.ie will inevitably end in bans and infractions. Its a hugely divisive minefield, its a hotbed of bigotry and racism.

The solution is to tread carefully on the iceflows of truth. They have a nasty tendency to melt in the fuzzy warmth of political correctness.

Scofflaw

vellakare wrote: »

I suspect trouble and the problem with any post mentioning this particular minority community on boards.ie will inevitably end in bans and infractions. Its a hugely divisive minefield, its a hotbed of bigotry and racism.

The solution is to tread carefully on the iceflows of truth. They have a nasty tendency to melt in the fuzzy warmth of political correctness.

Yet some people just have to come back again and again to ensure we all share their particular version of truth, don't they, dermo88?

moderately,
Scofflaw

K-9

Mod:

This is a 4 year old thread and seems to be causing some confusion with reporting posts that are ancient and from posters that were banned in the interim. I think it is better we lock this, users are free to start a new thread if they so wish.