Foreign Perspectives

Up until recent times the typical Gypsy image was of the cute caravan going along a country road in Ireland or perhaps of one of them coming round offering to tell your fortune.

However that changed towards the end of the 20th century with the cute caravans being replaced by ordinary ones and the images of the rubbish strewn wastelands created by roaming bands of these gypsies. Add to that the increase in petty crimes that always seemed to be associated with the arrival of a new band of these caravans and you can see why everyone else became less and less enchanted with them going from camp to camp.

So they were given housing.

Remembering that these people have a long tradition of being a travelling people dating back to their probable origin in India around a thousand years ago. I say “probable” because it’s next to impossible to truly trace the origins of a group of people who are nomadic as they don’t generally leave much evidence of their passing. You obviously can’t look for the typical archaeological remains that you would find with a settled group and are left with considering written accounts of their passing (of which there seems to be very little) or looking at less tangible things such as the structure of their language.

The snag is that giving them a fixed location without considering the substantial changes that would be necessary in their culture seems to have created major issues with their new neighbours. What seems to have happened is that some of the things deeply ingrained in their culture as a travelling people just doesn’t sit too well when they’re doing them constantly in a fixed location. For example, you’ll run out of people who want to get their fortune told after a few months which is fine if you’re moving on but not so good if you’re not. Thus, the fortune telling degrades into begging which itself isn’t well received and becomes more and more pushy over time too.

That life of travelling also had the problem that the children didn’t get educated as well as they might so there’s a tendency for the Gypsies to be pretty much totally unskilled. It’s not that they weren’t educated at all but that the education that they received was generally from within their families. Even when they did attend normal schools, a life of moving from school to school throughout a year obviously isn’t ideal for learning.

So in the end their name becomes “Gypsy scum”, the tolerance goes, they’re actively disliked and finally the local scum do something about it as happened recently in Belfast.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s almost certainly going to at least a generation to get this fixed. Their culture needs to adjust to living in a fixed spot but to do that they’ll need to drop some of the customs that they’ve carried out for centuries as otherwise they’ll remain despised by the locals. Without that their children won’t get enough of an education to get out of the “unskilled trap” that they’re currently in and moreover their children will grow to hate the non-gypsies which will only cause them more trouble. Already their holocaust history has caused some of them to accuse any anti-gypsy feeling as coming from Nazi tendencies which definitely isn’t helping their integration.