"By shaking hands with TV production companies and accepting big fat £££s they knowingly conform to and confirm the negative stereotyping that Jim here is so fiercely fighting against."
This is, of course true - like all basically poor people, Travellers will make money where they can to support their families.
I find the hypocrisy towards bare-fist fighting stunning.
It is a detestable 'sport' - as it was when I was an apprentice on the Liverpool Docks in the 1950s/early sixties, where I, had I been that way inclined, could find out where the latest 'cash fight' was taking place and spend my lunchtime watching two men stripped to the waist beating each other to a pulp with bare fists.
If I wished, I could have gone off to a badger baiting, or a dog-fight or a cock fight a few miles outside the city.
The kicking matches, where two mill workers would stand facing each other wearing wooden shoes, and take turns at kicking each other's shins until one of them could bear the pain no longer had, sadly, not long gone.
Mikeen McCarthy's father, Michael senior, was a miner for a time, and he prize fought bare fisted in the South Wales mines - with miners (he was the only Traveller in the game there).
I was once taken to a 'coursing match' by a tradesman where I worked, in Waterloo, North Liverpool - perfectly legal (it remains one of the popular 'sports' here in rural Ireland).
The sound and vision of two dogs fighting over a live hare, one holding one leg, the other another, until they managed to tear it in half, while men formed a ring and placed bets as to which of them would 'win' has never left me.
Nowadays, if I was into blood sports, I can turn on tele and watch two men beat each other brain-dead with gloves on.
Or I might even go into the countryside here and see groups of mounted men setting off to hound a fox to death - slowly and extremely reluctantly becoming a thing of the past.
Sex - now there's a thing - I can trawl the net and watch couples shagging whenever I choose - if I was into that sort of thing, I could find the same happening to children, and I'm assured that snuff movies, where women are filmed being raped and even killed are doing the rounds.
One of the sports around here is boy-racing, where young men climb into cars and turn our lanes into death traps - often killing and maiming themselves and innocent locals in the process.
We take the piss out of young Traveller women who marry in grotesque costumes yet happily accept all the risible fashions that appear on our screens in 'fashion shows' or in 'extremely Come Dancing - or some of those shows (very popular in the U.S. I understand), where parents dress up children (sometimes little older than toddlers) in adult costumes, complete with full makeup and hair styles, as 'jail bait' for the titillation of adults.
Don't get me started on the stylised violence that is on offer nightly - sometimes meriting its own channel.
We accept all these without a blink, yet hold up our hands in horror when a people who have been culturally and socially marginalised continue with a small number of practices that were still fairly common within my lifetime certainly.
The Travellers we knew were a highly moral people - we must have attended a dozen weddings (not a sign of the big frocks in those days - unless you counted Confirmation Dresses) - the parents went to sometimes extreme measures to ascertain that their daughters remained virgins right up to marriage.
Here we are - I opened a thread on what is happening to Travellers in Irealnd this very minute and am once again back to fighting to defend the people who are at the brunt of social ostracisation and persecution - funny old world!!
Jim Carroll