Coming to a piece of waste-ground near you soon....?

[Mr T.]

I'm Irish, I know about the gipsy problem
By Kevin Myers
(Filed: 03/10/2004)

It was a very judicial decision of the Appeal Court to allow travellers to camp in West Sussex in breach of planning laws. Judicial, that is to say, rather than judicious.

Their lordships, citing human rights grounds, probably do not fear the arrival of uninvited caravans next door the way that we who live in the Irish countryside do.

Moreover, those who pontificate most loudly about travellers' rights to camp just anywhere usually live in cities - as do those who describe as racists country people who don't want to wake up to find 20 unexpected caravans in the field beside them.

Listen. We in Ireland know a little about the traveller problem. Endless official indulgence and repeated invocation of human rights have created a traveller population that is chronically and ruinously dependent on the state.

Prosperous Ireland is now sucking immigrant workers from around the world, yet unemployment among traveller males stands at 75 per cent.

In Ireland, travellers are now a legally-recognised ethnic minority - we even spell the word "Traveller" with a capital "T" - but with no legally-binding definition. Councils are obliged to give itinerant travellers halting-sites, and also to house those who want settled accommodation. Some - naturally - want both, courtesy of the state.

One Catholic churchman, Bishop Willie Walsh (a crozier-wielder keeping such a pet-name says everything about his affable character), allowed travellers to park their caravans on his palace land - temporarily, or so he thought. Once there, they refused to go, despite his increasingly desperate requests.

Finally, he persuaded the families to move but they went directly into the car park of the newly-opened headquarters of Clare county council. After a while, they were evicted, and where did they go? Why, back to the poor bishop's lawns.

Next, County Clare opened a small show estate for travellers, with halting-sites and houses that cost £250,000 each to build. Two families on the bishop's land were offered the new homes and left, but then decided they didn't like their new neighbours.

A sorely-tried Willie Walsh sought to bring peace between the families, but the newly-housed family departed in their caravan: where to? Back to Willie Walsh's gardens.

The final indignity came last year, as Clare county council was preparing a reception to welcome Russian competitors in the Special Olympics for mentally-handicapped athletes. No sooner were the council gates opened than a convoy of traveller-caravans occupied the car park, and the welcoming reception for the desperately unfortunate Russians had to be cancelled.

That's what happens when you repeatedly indoctrinate any group about their rights, but not their duties. The result is a socially-dysfunctional minority who believe that they should be allowed to do as they want, spending summers on the road, halting as they like, and even claiming the dole wherever convenient. Irish farmers, helpless before the law, have taken to spreading pig slurry whenever travellers camp on their land.

Court writs are useless because the travellers are always moving, and their vehicles are seldom insured or taxed. Many travellers share almost identical names, so computers are confounded, especially since so few can ever remember their birth dates.

There are supposedly 20,000 travellers in Ireland, but who knows? A baptismal certificate legally serves as a birth certificate: a new-born child might be baptised in several churches, with several identities being created for it - plus of course several sets of children's allowances.

The Irish media have invariably treated stories of the travellers' excesses - the violence, the terrible faction fights, the endless trespasses - with a timorous, I-feel-your-pain political correctness. The expectations of the travellers themselves are thus always about the conduct of others - and these expectations have been ruinously fuelled by the workings of the Equality Agency, which only sees traveller victimhood and never traveller liability.

Irish travellers are increasingly taking their expectations to England, and English courts are behaving with precisely the same bien-pensant generosity that Irish courts have exhibited. A raggle-taggle-gipsy-oh romantic mist seems to settle on so many deliberations about travellers, but there is nothing romantic about traveller life.

It is patriarchal, caste-based, dirty, diseased, alcoholic, illiterate, violent, misogynistic (often brutally so), low-achieving - two thirds of traveller-children have abandoned all education by the age of 15 - and, most of all, short.

Only multicultural mumbo-jumbo at its most fatuous crowns this dismal tribal phenomenon with the title "culture". For travellers today possess no distinctive art form, and even their traditional skills - such as tin-smithing - are almost extinct.

Moreover, traveller values are overwhelmingly antithetical to individual happiness, personal achievement or social duty. The world will be far happier when the traveller-tradition is hastened to a humane end.

[Brass Monkey]

Travelers the people who like to live off the state but put noting back. I must admit apart from the government hand outs they so eagerly take they are very close to the nomadic lifestyle. A nomad being a person who moves into an area depletes if of all the easily accessible recourses, turns the place into an utter pig sty then moves on to do it again somewhere else. I wouldn’t want any of the so called Travelers in my back garden or even within 50 miles of my house, the wind follows these people. Washing just blows off the line and is never seen again.


Dave.

[beanie]

there are some really nasty ones around us