"..... than in the minds of those who don't even live here."
I see you seem to have fallen into Keith's slime pit - this is a really slimeball line of argument - little England writ large - "if you don't live here then you have no right to comment" - Jeeze, what's with you people?
If you feel you have any insight into Travellers' life in Britain that I don't, please feel free to offer it.
Where I have lived for the last dozen years is massively outweighed by the other 60 years I lived in Britain - Liverpool, Manchester and London, in that order. Half of those 60 years in Britain were spent in association with Travellers, probably the most rewarding and educational period of my life.
I found Travellers the most hospitable, welcoming and generous-to-a-fault people I ever met, far from the suspicious and secretive sub-species they have, and are still been painted. This is despite most of them having to live in abject poverty in Third World conditons and harrased and abused on a daily basis.
They are the vicitims of systematic abuse by the state, the media and by many of the general populace - try making a programme like 'My Big Fat Black/Asian/Jewish Wedding" and then wait for the response to come rolling in.
Far from choosing to live outside society, they have been deliberately driven out. A third of the Travelling population in Britain have no practical right to exist - they have no officicial sites for their homes to stop on; the majority of the official sites that do exist have a single stand-pipe for water, no sewage and no electricity. If they move into houses they are harrased and persecuted - I'd have enough money to buy every one of them a site if I had a £ for every time someone has asked my "how would you like one of them living next door to you?".
There is little in practical terms to choose between what is happening to Travellers in Britain and what happens in Ireland, it's just that the abuse here is more visibly blatent and less well-hidden than it is in the UK.
Not so long ago an Irish TD (equivilant to a UK member of parliament) proposed that all Travellers should be compulsarily electronically tagged - an up-to-date version of the Jewish yellow star.
This is little more than ethnic cleansing and is accepted as such by many people who work with Travellers, and it's happening on our own doorsteps.
I suggest that before people pontificate about Travellers, they arm themselves with a few facts instead of inbuilt and media and establishment-driven prejudices, and even a little face-to-face personal experience - who knows, they might even enjoy it, perish the thought!
Jim Carroll