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

If you want to live in a fantasy land where settled people are just as dangerous as travellers. Fine.

The rest of us will live in the real world.

In case you've genuinely misunderstood what I said, I'm not saying that settled people overall have the same crime rates as travellers.

Some groups within the settled community do. Those groups share a common characteristic with travellers, namely poverty.

There was no attempt to frame criticism of travellers as the fault of the far right. The point was that similar rhetoric which is used to criticise travellers in this case, is used by far right groups across Europe, and throughout history, as though ethnic minorities are an inferior species to the intellectually superior and sophisticated minority who are offering their criticism for the consideration of their acolytes.

We don’t have any serious problem with extremism in THIS country, thankfully. Had a bit of it in history what with knobhead groups like the IRA committing murder, carrying out bombings and hosting their own kangaroo courts, but since they discovered the drugs trade were a far more profitable venture there hasn’t been so much as a peep out of ‘em. Even Sinn Fein politicians are beginning to look civilised and a viable prospect for Government… really though only as a protest vote because people are kinda sick of the current shower. I’m more of a better the devil you know kinda guy - not a fan, but at least the current Government know HOW to run a country.

We have neither a problem with extremism from either the right or the left, in order for that to be an accurate portrayal of reality, both extremes would have to be taken seriously in the first place. Mattie McGrath is taken about as seriously as Mick Wallace in this country - they’re voted for by anarchists, not fascists. Fascists of course are a feature of extremism, not a bug, and they equally be either left or right leaning in their political ideology.

As far as inventing bogeymen go, well your own use of John Connors is a good example - he’s qualified on the basis that he’s nothing more than a clown who is only interested in himself, he’s anyone’s whore so long as he’s convinced there’s something in it for himself, and he’ll kiss anyone’s arse being so desperate as he is for the approval and validation. That he flips sides like a dolphin on crack and changes his political views on a whim, comes as no surprise, to anyone, whatsoever.

Your humourous observation is no more unusual than people who claim to be victims of travellers expressing their own desires for policies which they imagine are justifiable on the basis of redressing the imbalance of social injustice that they imagine exists from their perspective. I wouldn’t call them social justice warriors because they don’t like that term, it’s inflammatory to refer to gobshìtes in such unflattering terms. The politically correct way to refer to them is as victims, expressing their experiences of victimisation and oppression at the hands of travellers, that ethnic group which makes up 0.7% of the population, but represents 100% of everything that’s wrong with modern Irish society. If only they actually had that sort of influence, but in order for that to happen they would first have to be recognised as equals in law, rather than being needed to be granted special status in Irish law as an ethnic minority which imposes a duty on the State to uphold their way of life by means of redressing historic injustices inflicted upon them by the State.

You claim to want children to learn about the reality of travellers, well there’s the facts, and then there’s your narrative. Both are fairly shìtty options as they’re both as misery filled as each other and I wouldn’t support ever inflicting that sort of guilt trip on anyone, let alone small children who by virtue of the fact that they’re barely out of nappies, the only mark of any significance they’ve yet made on the world is the skid marks in their nappies.

Some adults in Irish society have yet to leave such an indelible mark on Irish society, but it’s not for the lack of trying as they attempt to emulate political leaders throughout history who were far more influential and articulate than they’ll ever be. Even WITH the proliferation of social media, the best many of them can manage is a tiny following of similarly simple-minded individuals who are angry, bitter, frustrated and armed with two brain cells fighting over the space in their cranial cavity seek to make other people’s lives more miserable than theirs, because that’s the only way they’ll feel that their lives are fair and they’re due what they deserve, as though it’s their birthright to be highly regarded and respected in Irish society, to be recognised and rewarded for having contributed the sum of fcukall to Irish society.

Imagine kicking off like spoiled brats because another group in Irish society are being recognised and they aren’t? That’s the kind of nutball you’re dealing with when they kick off because there’s been talks for the last four years about the possibility of developing and introducing a curriculum geared towards keeping traveller children interested and engaged in education. It’s the reason there’s no engagement in formal education among travellers in the first place - because they’re made to feel like they don’t belong in formal education. That’s what makes it easy to sneer at the idea that travellers first have to engage in an education system which doesn’t recognise or accommodate them in any way, shape or form, but is established to cater to the nutballs who already have significant advantages over others, and any attempt to offer opportunities to other groups, they see those opportunities as being a disadvantage imposed upon them, as though it were a zero-sum game and it’s just not possible to accommodate everyone.

That’s not reality though, is it?

Which one of those violations of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights would you like the State to impose specifically upon travelers first - the one about it being a condition of receiving support from the State that they be deprived of an equal right to determine the size of their own families on the same basis as anyone else who isn’t a member of the traveller community, or the one where as a condition of receiving support from the State they be deprived of an equal right to enter into marriage on the same basis as anyone who isn’t a member of the traveller community?

I’d be interested in hearing the justification for either one imposed specifically upon the traveller community, because we already know from history the kind of societies that those sorts of actions imposed by the State have led to; it’s the reason why Article 8 exists in the first place, precisely to address the injustices which you would have the State impose specifically upon members of the traveller community.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand the underlying theory that motivates the idea. Margaret Sanger was way ahead of you though in her attempt to address poverty in the black community in the US - simply make less of ‘em, and the problem goes away by itself. Unfortunately for the black community, Margaret Sanger was visualising the problem from her own perspective, not theirs, and expecting similarly to you that they should have to meet her half-way when she’s extending what from her perspective is an olive branch, from their perspective it’s a thorn-covered rose.

They could see the immediate advantages for them personally, they couldn’t have imagined the long-term consequences, which is where they are today. Were it not for the civil rights movement and the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, they would be in an even lesser position than they are today, because the introduction of birth control and other measures didn’t do anything to alleviate poverty in black communities, no more than it would do anything to alleviate poverty among the traveller community in Ireland. Feminists would be the only ones celebrating what would become a pyrrhic victory for society, thinking it was a job well done, ignoring the fact that it has done nothing to even address poverty, let alone alleviate it.

That's some stream of consciousness.

I’ll stop ye their horse because frankly I’ve heard it all before. No, really, I have, numerous times, the usual BS tropes that aren’t in any way based on fact, but rather on maintaining what can only be described as a fairly loose grip on reality, and a firm grip on victimhood.

In as simple terms as I can be arsed at this stage - if a parrot repeats everything Enoch Powell says, does that mean the parrot is far-right? Of course not. The point isn’t the parrots politics, it’s that they’re repeating the same rhetoric which is used by a far-right fcuknugget who actually had some considerable influence in UK politics at the time. Nobody is claiming the parrot is the reincarnation of Enoch Powell. The parrots still just a parrot, doing what a parrot does, with little understanding of the rhetoric they’re actually repeating, all they know or care about is that for performing their party trick, they are rewarded with a cracker.

Here they’re rewarded with likes on social media. That’s all they actually care about.

Plenty of people on here promoting the idea of travelers being inferior as an ethnic group. It's just there's a veiled attempt to sanitize this hatred using the term culture, eg. traveler culture is inferior, or traveler culture is all about crime. This doesn't itself make you far-right or neo-fascist but it is a feature of these movements and worth calling out because of that.

https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/ethnocentrism/

Rest assured I’m calm as the feckin’ breeze mate - had my morning coffee, caught up on my emails, ‘bout to catch up on Smallville on Amazon Prime and adjusted my office chair for maximum comfort while I pretend to do a bit that looks like work. If you think of yourself as a ‘wage/rent slave’, safe to say you’re in the wrong job and should probably look into doing something about that.

I completely agree with you on the first part though - on it’s own, an introduction in the curriculum like this changes nothing, it’s mere tokenism and children are as likely to tune out of it as everything else in the curriculum they can’t relate to that isn’t Snapchat. If it were introduced as part of a series of measures to meaningfully address the issues of attempting to integrate travellers into Irish society, then there might actually be a reasonable discussion to be had as to how such measures might be best implemented for the benefit of Irish society as a whole.

Until then, this measure for what it’s worth, means nothing, but at least it costs nothing too, which is about the only benefit it has going for it.

This is where I answered that already, or are you just trying to go around in circles?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120323229/#Comment_120323229

That was where you failed to establish a link between what people have been saying on this thread and your opinion.

You’re very perceptive. I’ll bet you can tell what meaning I’m assigning to your narrative and all. More to the point - what credibility I’m assigning to your narrative given that it isn’t the least bit based on fact.

Even more to the point, it’s just not going to happen that such narratives will be part of any national curriculum involving educating children about traveller culture, certainly not in any formal education setting anyways, so your narrative of “the reality of travellers” just isn’t worth entertaining as it has nothing to do with the proposed curriculum or it’s content. Yours is an entirely separate issue, one that no doubt will generate interest among the people who share your opinions of travellers, and not much else, thankfully.