Are you a member of the Unsettled Community?
This was a question I put to a person who was giving me grief recently over Clare County Council’s Traveller Accommodation policy. The person in question is not a member of the Traveller community, but kept referring to me as a member of the Settled community.
This little interaction got me thinking and to be honest, I do not like being defined as a member of the settled community. A quick check in the dictionary reveals that the word "settle" is a middle english transitive verb with a general meaning of to seat, bring to rest, or come to rest.
If I accept that I am a member of the settled community, then by implication of the use of the term "settled" I have to accept that at one point I was "unsettled". This is not the case. I have never been a nomad in the Irish Traveller sense . Irish travellers are peripatetic nomads, therefore they are a mobile population moving among settled populations offering a craft or trade. That was the traditional role. I, and none of the generations in my back ground, that I am aware of, had such a life style. Perhaps I am being overly precious about the use of labels? There are peoples who define themselves as different from the general society in which they live. Differences because of age, ethnicity and disability are not matters of choice and such groups deserve respect and to be treated fairly. Yet expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person, but different to general society is like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
General society can savage people who, by no choice of their own, are different. An example of this was when the journalist Mary Ellen Synon described Travellers as living, "a life worse than the beasts, for beasts at least, are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man nor the steadying instinct of animals". Four years later, she described the Paralympics as "perverse and grotesque", and that sport was not "about finding someone who can wobble his way around a track in a wheelchair or who can swim from one end of a pool by Braille". While this is an extreme example, it is yet an example of the lack of respect, understanding and simple good manners visited on those who should be protected. A less visible example is an inspection of the demographics of Irish travellers which make for stark reading. Members of the Traveller community are 10 times more likely to die in road accidents. At 22%, this represents the most common cause of death among Traveller males. Infants are 10 times more likely to die before reaching the age of two, while a third of Travellers die before the age of 25. In addition, 80% of Travellers die before the age of 65. Some 10% of Traveller children die before their second birthday, compared to just 1% of the general population. In Ireland, 2.6% of all deaths in the total population were for people aged under 25, versus 32% for the Travellers.
If I belonged to a group that suffered those statistics I would leave no stone unturned to resolve the demographic difference between such a group and general society hence my initial reaction to being called a member of the settled community. However, the fact is, I am part the general society that allows such statistics exist. That is nothing to beam about either.