Dr. Hannagh McGinley,
NUI Galway

There’s a huge reluctance, in many quarters to name the experiences of Irish Travellers as racism. We see still racism as something that’s within the black/white binary. I even see people who should know better, working in anti-racist organisations, supporting migrants and other groups, not acknowledging that racism is something that’s been part of the fabric of Irish society, for as far back as we can remember.

It’s not new. Immigrants didn’t bring it on the boat. It’s always existed here. So when we’re having conversations about racism, if we’re not speaking about Irish Travellers, then it’s really superficial. I feel very strongly about that. It’s incredibly infuriating – and hurtful – to Travellers, to have their experience dismissed, just because they weren’t sent to refugee camps for example. They’re still living in dire conditions without access to water. They’re living in worse conditions than many people in developing nations.

Your understanding of racism has to be relative to the context that you live in. We don’t understand racism in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement in America: it’s a very different experience here. Context is everything.

My fear is that we create hierarchies of racism. Instead of bringing people together to work together in solidarity groups,  we’re creating divides between them, implying that one group’s experiences are worse than another. They’re not – if it’s making people take their lives, or if people have no life chances, how bad do you want it to be before you can say “it is what it is”? We just have to look at the statistics in relation to Irish Travellers to see that.

People need to be braver around racism and call it out. That can be difficult, particularly with racism towards Travellers: there’s difficulties around challenging something so normalised. It’s the one that gets your hands messy. It can mean challenging your nearest and dearest if they show an inherent racism towards Travellers. That can be a very difficult thing to do.

We need to give people the skills to challenge racism in a productive way. It can be exhausting, but we need to look at the institutional racism and the really blatant issues where people aren’t getting housing, people aren’t getting jobs; where children are being segregated at school level for primary school – and so on. These are the issues I’d like to see us focus on, to challenge the racism and discrimination towards Travellers, which still prevails in Irish society.

This contribution featured in Part 1 of 100 Voices: #AllAgainstRacism. Read Part 2 in the current issue of Hot Press:

Special thanks to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission for their support in this project.