A Traveller Family (RTÉ One, Monday) 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 channels, single parenthood, neurodiversity and a generation whose accents are more California than Crumlin, Cobh or Carlow.
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. Christine Collins thinks back to her school days and the time a rival player used an ethnic slur against her during a basketball match.
“I don’t want him suspended – I still have to be in class with him. I wanted him to know what he said was wrong.” So she wrote a letter explaining why she was proud to be a Traveller. “That little moment in time was transformative for a lot of children in the class,” recalls her former teacher. “The content of what you had to say was so critical – they listened attentively.”
Christine’s 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 – 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’t one of “those” Travellers. “People I would have worked with – they would bring up a conversation about Travellers as if they are other people,” he says. “You’re not real.”
Ignorance towards Travellers remains a huge blind spot in Irish society. With luck Alex Fegan’s quietly thoughtful documentary will go some way towards opening people’s 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.
Johnny thinks about the future, but his father feels it is important to hold on to the past. Michael’s uncle, Big James, is one of the few remaining Traveller tinsmiths, his skills extending to building a traditional barrel-top wagon “from the ground up”. “Even though James would never see himself as an artist – to see the paintwork, and how the wheels are made and the way everything sits so perfectly… that is an artist,” says Michael.
James is also the last of a generation. “I’d love to see a young lad picking it up,” he says of being a tinsmith. “We’re not going to live forever. And then that’s the end of tinsmithing.”
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.
He explains that a Traveller can never just be a person – he or she has to represent an entire community, whether they like it or not. “It does become this thing – ‘I heard a story about Travellers, there’s all these problems with Travellers, why don’t you fix this or that?’ It comes down to this thing where you’re representing a whole community of people. And that’s not fair.”
