Travelling People have deep roots in Ireland

I remember the makeshift roadside camps of the Travelling People seasonally situated at crossroads and bridges at various points along the Moy or in the Ox Mountains. As a child, I was often afraid of these strange people who came to the door asking for food; a few spuds here or a cake of bread there, to supplement their diet of trout and wild game. If my father was at home there might also be the exchange of a tin ponny for a silver sixpence.

Back then, the term to describe these Irish nomads was 'Tinker'. It wasn’t a derogatory term; it actually described the craft of tin smithing; the way they made their living. If the truth about these people and their customs was to be fully examined, we might well find that this marginalised group within our population are in fact the most Irish of Irish people. Today, Travellers in Ireland represent less than 1% of our total population.

Origins 

One unlikely theory on Traveller origins suggests a very early beginning, where Travellers are descended from a community that lived in Ireland prior to the arrival of the Celts. Once Ireland was claimed as a Celtic nation, this group became seen as a lower class. There is a second theory that an indigenous, itinerant community of craftsmen are the ancestors of Travellers, who unlike the Celts, never settled.

Another theory, based on genetic analysis, shows Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. It is difficult to know if this divergence was by choice, given the seasonal nature of our climate. While they are not too severe, Irish winters are hardly ideal camping weather.

Cinematographer and director Stephen Gerard Kelly, writing about the Travelling Community, provides the following background on how their lives have changed in recent decades.

Previously travelling in horse drawn carriages, Irish Travellers are commercial nomads engaged in metalworking, horse-trading and construction. Legal changes governing access to public lands and the establishment of halting sites, semi-permanent locations with services, has had far reaching ramifications on their traditions.

With a distinct identity, language and customs, officially recognised by the European Union, and only recently recognised by the Irish government in 2017 after decades of campaigning, Irish Travellers have been documented as part of Irish society for centuries.

In the past, they worked with metal and travelled throughout Ireland making items such as tin utensils, ornaments, jewellery, and horse harnesses to earn a living. Today, the culture of Irish Travellers resembles the culture of other itinerant communities the world over regarding self-employment, family networks, birth, marriage, and burial rituals, taboos and folklore.

An early 19th-century engraving of a member of the Irish Traveller group, or 'Tinker' as they were then commonly known, pursue the group's traditional occupation of tinsmithing. He wears a top hat and ragged clothes as he fixes the tin pan of a woman in a bonnet. Around his stovecart are other metal objects. Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Ranelagh revealed 

The following story provided the inspiration for this piece so, stay with me here, allow me to take you back in time. Irish Heritage News, in an article entitled 'Roscommon’s Forgotten Cemetery' (May 15, 2023), provides us with a very interesting insight into our past. In the summer of 2015, archaeologists commenced excavation of a previously unrecorded ringfort complex in the townland of Ranelagh, just north of Roscommon town.

Phase 4 activity (AD 750–1000) at Ranelagh saw the modification of the enclosure ditch and the construction of features associated with light industrial activity, the largest of which were an earth-cut souterrain and two apparent metalworking structures.

Artefacts from these included a fragment from a flat-bottomed crucible or cupel with residues of silver, copper and iron, an iron penannular brooch, an iron blade, a copper-alloy ring brooch, “bird's head” motif ringed pins of iron and copper alloy, and an iron ladle.

Using innovative post-excavation scientific analysis techniques, such as DNA and isotopic analysis, as well as more traditional interpretative methods, the excavation at Ranelagh has revealed a wealth of data regarding this community’s subsistence and farming activities, manufacturing capabilities, genetics, general health, treatment of the old and infirm, and funerary practices. The site has exposed the fundamental realities of life and death in Ireland over a period of 1,300 years.

Of the human remains found at the site, one third were aged under one year, one third were aged between one year and 18 years and the remaining third were adults. While you reflect on those disturbing figures, reflect also on the following statistics from the All-Ireland Traveller Health Study 2010.

With a life expectancy 15 years lower than the general population, both Travellers living in houses and those still living in caravans remain the most marginalised, economically disadvantaged and discriminated against community in contemporary Irish society.

From Goldsmith to Tinker 

Following successive invasions, from the time of Strongbow to the arrival of Cromwell, the native Irish were forced to either modernise or be trampled underfoot; settle or take to the road. Some settled, some fought, some left and some died. 

Others stayed on the roads, leading the nomadic life and earning a meagre living as simple craftspeople. Maybe the community at Ranelagh ended its days in this a way.

Cast you mind back to the Ireland of old, to the time of the chieftains, to a time when there was a place for everyone and where everyone had a place, a trade. There were the poets, the druids, the horsemen, the warriors and the metal workers. Among the metalworkers there were the goldsmith, the silversmith and the tinsmith. Imagine, if you will, who might have made the axe heads for our hunters, the broches for our kings or the chalices for our priests?

Now imagine the fall of ancient Ireland, the various invasions, the loss of chiefdoms and kingdoms, the rise of landlordism and our eventual colonisation. In this new landscape, where are our sages and our craftsmen, their wisdom no longer sought, their skills no longer required? 

With their raw materials out of reach, their talents no longer valued, they take to the road. On the road, they live off nature and continue to ply the only trades they know within their new-found position in Irish society; the poorest of the poor. The fortune teller, the harpist, the poet, the jeweller and the tinsmith, all left to survive on God’s good grace and the mercy of those above them.

Reflection 

Of course, these thoughts are mere imaginings, musings on possibilities. However, if they lead to a little reflection, I can live with that. 

Ewan McColl, songwriter and constant champion of the under privileged, was happy to include The Travelling People among those immortalised in his songs...

I’m a freeborn man of the travelling people, 

Got no fixed abode with nomads I am numbered. 

Country lanes and byways were always my ways, 

I never fancied being lumbered.