Irish Traveller culture to be promoted through school curriculum: Posted on BBC website!

 'an important resource to support teachers, practitioners and students in understanding and appreciating Traveller culture and history'.

I wonder if the craic at weddings and funerals will be covered?

I'm all for talking about traveller culture in schools but I'm not for sugar coating the realities of Travellers either. 

All you're doing is saying that one thing appears to be a bit like the other therefore they're the same. 

Everything is the fault of or related to the far right according to some people.

Do you honestly imagine “the realities of travellers” is going to be part of any national curriculum in Irish schools? Of course it’s not, and imagining it should be or arguing that it should be would just be silly.

I get what MegamanBoo is saying - similar rhetoric as is being deployed here in relation to an ethnic minority is the same sort of rhetoric is deployed in relation to minority ethnic groups in other countries.

That sort of rhetoric IS the fault of the far right, because they use it. Nobody else uses it. Nobody else is interested in humiliating and degrading other groups in any given society save for the kind of people who hold opinions that their own beliefs are superior to all others, that they as a group are superior, and other groups are inferior. It’s standard “us vs them” stuff that’s a lot more pernicious than just some benign “sharing observations and exchanging experiences” nonsense. It’s purpose is solely to demonise other groups of people in society.

I’m not in favour of sugar coating that sort of bullshìt. It serves no useful purpose or benefit whatsoever to subject children to that crap when they’re not responsible for it, and their parents who send them to school for the purposes of receiving an education aren’t responsible for it. There are a tiny minority within every social group who are responsible for the negative attitudes and behaviour towards other people, which they are entirely responsible for and which they perpetuate. Trying to suggest the majority are responsible for the behaviour of a minority amounts to nothing more than hateful bullshìt and trying to spread fearmongering crap and prejudice.

Irish society has moved on from that sort of crap, it’s just no longer the case that hateful bigots have any influence here, they died out with the last vestiges of the local crawthumpy fcuknugget preaching from the pulpit about the dangers of and threats posed by outside groups to their vision of Irish society. The same sort of rhetoric that was used by men like Fr. John Creagh to denounce Jews from the pulpit and incite hatred, bitterness and resentment among the congregation of people who wanted to be thought of by others as good and decent Christians -

The Jews were once chosen by God. But they rejected Christ, they crucified Him. They called down the curse of His precious blood on their heads . . . They were scattered over the earth after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and they bore away with them an unquenchable hatred for the name of Jesus Christ and his followers . . . The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable, with want on their faces, and now they have enriched themselves and can boast a very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for silk . . . How do the Jews manage to make their money? Some of you may know their methods better than I do, but it is still my duty to expose these methods. They go about as peddlers from door to door, pretending to offer articles at very cheap prices, but in reality charging several times more than in the shops . . . They forced themselves and their goods upon the people and the people are blind to their tricks . . .’

https://www.historyireland.com/the-limerick-pogrom-1904/

It IS only far-right groups and fascists who want to reintroduce that shìt to Irish society, and thankfully for Irish society, those people are squarely in a vanishingly tiny minority who have no influence or any kind of political power whatsoever.

Pavee point put out a leaflet years ago to dispel stereotypes.

All bar one could be summed up as "This isn't true.........but", there was one about marrying cousins or something and then after saying how it was untrue they mention that with a smaller close knit community it happens.

It was their own thing and not like they were getting fact checked on anything.

Only one they didn't counter their own statement was for paying taxes, and that they pay vat. They couldn't just say they pay tax in general or anything, but went with the unavoidable vat as some gotcha argument.

All this course material would do is give the person giving it enough rope to hang themselves with, unless they plan it to be only for very young children where it'd be completely pointless and show it as nothing more than a vanity thing. This ends up in front of teenagers and they will regret it.

Culture...right

This isn’t even a case of “if the cap fits” Fugue because I didn’t even have you in mind when I said what I said and I identified the kind of people who DO perpetuate the kind of blatant hatred and prejudice I was referring to in order to maximise fearmongering, prejudice and hatred of travellers. Christ sake you always remind me of the Principal in my son’s primary school who if she leaned any more a liberal leftie she’d have fallen over 😁 We were complete opposites on the political spectrum, but we’d much in common too like ensuring children received an education regardless of their background or socioeconomic circumstances. To say it drove other members of the Board of Management batty is an understatement. They detested the idea of “their” school being “infiltrated” or the reputation of the school being undermined by admitting children who didn’t come from a “respectable” background.

The one example I most clearly remember was the traveller woman who was looking to escape her abusive husband for hers and her children’s sake. They could’ve gone anywhere because the services do exist, but she knew having been in and out of them that the services available treat travellers very differently than “perfect victims”, an idealistic stereotype which women and families who avail of the services are expected to conform to, staffed by agency workers like TUSLA and so on, that when they get involved things go to shìt, real fast. I’ll cut a long story short and say that within an hour she had accommodation and her children had a place in the same school as my son, and things have been going well for them since. They’re the rare and incredibly lucky cases, among the vast majority that aren’t so fortunate.

It’s not the result of having big families or having families too early or not finishing school if they attend school at all regularly in the first place which is in itself difficult to do for numerous reasons, whether it’s their circumstances at home or their experiences in school which are often negative and not something they want to have to experience day after day when they’re already dealing with enough shìt that other children just don’t, children who come from families where they’re not woken up by being beaten, sent to school hungry, have to put up with teachers that have no time for them, children from respectable families who mock them, y’know, the list goes on, and then they go home to the same shìt. They’re being set up to fail, because they can’t integrate into society when they’re operating from a rule book that says they’ll be starting with massive disadvantages, and expected to maintain the same standards which are far easier to maintain for the majority of children who are not subject to similar mistreatment.

Then they get to their teenage years and having grown up in a society where their options if they’re not a thug or a menace to society are pretty limited to becoming involved in drugs and prostitution, because there’s very few apprenticeships going any more, and women aren’t encouraged to take up employment. That’s if they haven’t tried to emulate Tyson Fury - “the gypsy king” and the whole boxing fiasco that amounts to nothing more than exploitative entertainment and big business masquerading as a sport.

Travellers don’t break away from these patterns without support, and Jesus it’s fine if anyone doesn’t want to offer support, whatever, y’know? But the constant criticism and humiliation, that’s not support, and wanting to show “the reality of travellers” from their perspective, that’s not support, it’s chomping at the bit for a bit for an opportunity to humiliate people who aren’t in anything like an equal position to be able to tell that person to fcuk right off. It’s true that travellers are vastly over-represented among the prison population, it’s also true that this is because of the prejudice towards travellers which already exists in society which holds them to an even higher standard than “Johnny 99 convictions but will never see the inside of a cell” types, only because he’s not a traveller.

The absolute handful of individual travellers who do go on to third level education or gain legitimate employment? They don’t do it without massive support, and the resources are there to provide that same level of support to every traveller, but only if they “take the soup” as it were, which the majority of travellers just aren’t willing to do. There’s nobody saying that anyone should be told they’re a victim, I’m saying that the onus is on the State, in recognition of travellers as an ethnic minority, that they receive the same support and treatment as people who aren’t travellers, the people who are constantly bitching and moaning about where “their” tax money is spent and who it’s being spent on that they didn’t personally approve, the people who thought they were fierce clever altogether by belittling and sneering at the traveller girl who had the courtesy to do the AMA that time with questions about where travellers get their income and all the rest of it… give travellers the same support and opportunities to make something of themselves as those people, because that’s an obligation of the State, as opposed to giving people who love nothing more than an opportunity to sneer at and belittle people they see as beneath them, yet more opportunities to degrade and humiliate people who don’t share their views, opinions or beliefs.

At that rate those people are never actually required to demonstrate how they are actually in any way superior to other people, they just have to ensure that other people don’t get ideas above their station. Those aren’t conservative ideals, they’re the ideals of petty, selfish, immature, bitter and cruel people who are threatened by everything, and they have quite a list of groups who they perceive as threats to their security, which they extrapolate out as being threats to wider society as a whole. I mean it worked well here for the Catholic Hierarchy for a number of decades, until enough people from all the different groups derided by the Catholic Hierarchy decided they’d taken enough of their shìt. They’re still Catholic, they just don’t put up with the Hierarchy’s shìt no more is all.

Any attempt to frame descriptions of negative experiences with Travellers as the work of the far right should be met with disdain because it has no basis in fact.

Everything negative in Ireland these days is the fault of the far right. The far right in Ireland is pathetic and enjoy little to no support. We do however have far left politicians in the Dail one of whom as recently as last week was on national radio suggesting that were a left leaning government elected at any point that the Gardai and Defence Forces would be used to launch a coup to remove any such left leaning government from power. This person also suggested that FF and FG are actively setting up grass roots far right groups to cause civil unrest.

We have a serious problem with extremist politics in Ireland, the far right are realistically less than 5% of that problem, the rest is the far left wackos actually inside the Dail right now and their need to construct a far right bogeyman to ensure their own relevance, and they're doing a damn good job of it because everything is getting looped back to the fault of the far right, even people sharing negative experiences of traveller's, which is ironic after we saw John Connors showing his support and speaking at an event set up by the National Party a couple of years ago. Funny how the victim groups that well meaning social justice types try their best to help sometimes end up being the most demonstrably right leaning people in their own actions.

Each to their own

Hatful comments?

Looking forward to Traveller history month however.

Tell me Ham_Sandwich, in your opinion what format should Traveller history month follow and what should be the goal of Traveller history month?

I'm sure you have a lot of suggestions about the content that should be disseminated to the Irish people during Traveller history month and could likely talk about it at length in the what I would assume would be a very detailed anthropological manner, but if you could just "big picture" it for us lay folk and break down the major bullet points it would be greatly appreciated.

“Individual travellers do - and they get an education, even going to college, and it's fecking great. But telling them they're victims god love them and this is only the bigots' fault... what the heck does that achieve?”

Is that at all in the curriculum? Have you got an outline?

Just to clarify what I've said here. Speaking in the manner many here have does not in itself make you a neo-fascist. There would have to be other characteristics displayed which have yet to come to light in this thread.

It does however mean you speak the same way about minority groups that neo-fascists do. The pseudo-intellectualism of racism, portraying cultures as criminal or inferior, misrepresenting criminal statistics or events.

Interestingly Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a talk on hate recently.

I don't care about some platitudes from an actor.

It's honestly bizarre that you think that there's no such thing as bad cultures. There's big bit of moral relativism going on in your posts clearly, so I won't deal with anything subjective. But surely you can agree that any culture that involves criminality is a bad culture?

What exactly are you talking about in 2023 though.

In Jewish religion, genital mutilation is still a custom too (circumcision).

Is this a reason to ostracize Jews or to object to having Jewish religion and history being taught in schools, much as it already is?

All this guff and noise about traveler crime rates etc doesn't actually get to the topic of traveler culture in the school curriculum.