{"id":446218,"date":"2026-05-13T06:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T06:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/446218\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T06:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T06:03:14","slug":"quietly-thoughtful-insight-into-a-proud-community-struggling-with-identity-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/446218\/","title":{"rendered":"Quietly thoughtful insight into a proud community struggling with identity \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Traveller Family (RT\u00c9 One<\/a>, 9.35pm) opens with the keening note of a traditional song that hangs in the air like a solitary bird riding the upwinds, but then plunges into an Ireland we will all recognise today. A place of YouTube<\/a> channels, single parenthood<\/a>, neurodiversity and a generation whose accents are more California than Crumlin, Cobh or Carlow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it also brings us an Ireland many of us cannot fully understand because our lived experiences are so different from those of the Irish Traveller community<\/a>. Christine Collins thinks back to her school days and the time a rival player used an ethnic slur against her during a basketball match.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want him suspended \u2013 I still have to be in class with him. I wanted him to know what he said was wrong.\u201d So she wrote a letter explaining why she was proud to be a Traveller. \u201cThat little moment in time was transformative for a lot of children in the class,\u201d recalls her former teacher. \u201cThe content of what you had to say was so critical \u2013 they listened attentively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christine\u2019s younger brother, Johnny, is an English student in UCD and the first of his extended family to attend college. He talks about how settled Travellers can struggle with a split identity \u2013 accepted by neither the mainstream community nor Travellers. His father, Michael, recalls colleagues speaking negatively about Travellers in his company, but then insisting he should not take offence because he wasn\u2019t one of \u201cthose\u201d Travellers. \u201cPeople I would have worked with \u2013 they would bring up a conversation about Travellers as if they are other people,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re not real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ignorance towards Travellers remains a huge blind spot in Irish society. Alex Fegan\u2019s quietly thoughtful documentary will hopefully go some way towards opening people\u2019s eyes, though it is never polemical and instead lets its subjects speak for themselves. We join Michael, a playwright, writer and activist, during rehearsals for a play about suicide among Travellers; and follow Johnny as he attends a tutorial at UCD.<\/p>\n

Johnny thinks about the future, but his father feels it is important to hold on to the past. Michael\u2019s uncle, Big James, is one of the few remaining Traveller tinsmiths, his skills extending to building a traditional barrel-top wagon \u201cfrom the ground up\u201d. \u201cEven though James would never see himself as an artist \u2013 to see the paintwork, and how the wheels are made and the way everything sits so perfectly\u2026 that is an artist,\u201d says Michael.<\/p>\n

James is also the last of a generation. \u201cI\u2019d love to see a young lad picking it up,\u201d he says of being a tinsmith. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to live forever. And then that\u2019s the end of tinsmithing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will the documentary speak to those who have already made up their minds about Travellers? Probably not. In Ireland, few prejudices are as entrenched. But, as Johnny points out early in the film, it does humanise a group of people too often reduced to statistics.<\/p>\n

He explains that a Traveller can never just be a person \u2013 he or she has to represent an entire community, whether they like it or not. \u201cIt does become this thing \u2013 \u2018I heard a story about Travellers, there\u2019s all these problems with Travellers, why don\u2019t you fix this or that?\u2019 It comes down to this thing where you\u2019re representing a whole community of people. And that\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Traveller Family (RT\u00c9 One, 9.35pm) opens with the keening note of a traditional song that hangs in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,6085,42856,5762],"class_list":["post-446218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-rte","tag-travellers","tag-ucd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}