Irish Travellers are perhaps the most excluded and disadvantaged ethnic minority group in Britain today. Government research revealing low literacy levels, poor school attainment, shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates paint a depressing picture of a community with significantly poorer life chances than the rest of society. Underpinning many of the disadvantages which Irish Travellers face is the national shortage of Traveller sites. 25% of the UK’s Gypsies and Travellers are officially categorised as homeless due to insufficient legal sites for them to settle on.
‘Life for Irish Travellers is not easy and it never has been. Yet despite this they remain a fiercely proud people who have held true to their culture, heritage and their faith when lesser people would have buckled. Throughout my 15 years of working with the Traveller community, I am constantly humbled by their resilience and resourcefulness. They fight on to build a better future for their families, in the face of all sorts of hardships and setbacks.’ (Fr Joe Browne, Former Manager of the Chaplaincy’s Travellers Project)
What Our Project Does:
The ICB Traveller Project’s work focuses on improving the situation of Irish Travellers in prison in England and Wales. Through its prisoner project, ICPO, the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain has been working with Irish Travellers in custody for the past 25 years and have found clients from this group to be especially vulnerable and isolated. Our own impressions of Travellers experiences in prison were backed up by NOMS’ Race Review 2008, which noted:
“particular concerns relating to Gypsy Traveller Roma prisoners included: difficulties accessing services, including offender behaviour programmes, as the literacy level required was too high, derogatory and racist name calling primarily by prisoners, and by some staff, in two of the prisons visited, lack of confidence in the complaints system and the lack of cultural awareness and understanding of staff.”
It was for these reasons that in 2010 the Irish Chaplaincy launched the Voices Unheard research project to look at the experiences of Irish Travellers in prison. Key findings from the research were that:
• Irish Travellers represent between 0.6% and 1% of the entire prison population and between 2.5% and 4% of the minority ethnic population in prison.
• There is no effective, overall strategy for monitoring Gypsies or Irish Travellers in prison.
• A lack of monitoring has led to a failure to formulate or implement measures to ensure equality of opportunity for this prisoner group despite the stated ‘priority’ given to addressing ‘the needs of Gypsy Traveller Roma prisoners’ by NOMS.
• 59.3 % of Irish Traveller prisoners were identified as requiring basic educational intervention.
• Irish Travellers in prison are commonly subjected to racist treatment from other prisoners and from some staff.
Moving forward from this research, the Travellers’ Project is working in collaboration with prison staff who work with Irish Traveller prisoners; providing information, advice and free resources such as educational aids, magazines and DVDs. We have helped set up Traveller groups in prisons across the country and deliver diversity training to Probation and Prison staff working with Irish Travellers. We are also conducting further research to look at the particular challenges that this group face post-release.
Aside from our work in prisons, the Travellers Project continues to campaign on issues affecting Irish Travellers nationally, particularly in relation to discrimination, planning law and site provision. In 2011 we were involved in the much publicised campaign to save the Dale Farm Travellers site in Basildon, Essex. Dale Farm was not a unique case; every year up and down the country local authorities spend millions evicting Travellers from unauthorised sites. But with a national shortfall of some 4000 legal pitches, moving Travellers on only leads to a continuous, costly cycle of eviction and further unauthorised development. Evictions without alternative provision of sites solve nothing and add to the marginalisation and exclusion of this community.
Voices Unheard: A Study of Irish Travellers in Prison - Full Report 2011
