Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

One of the oddities of Northern Ireland is that the almost total lack of cross-over between the Scottish descent population and the Irish descent population imeans that complete lack of comprehension in some areas can still exist even now.

For instance, something like seven or eight years ago a colleague in work happened to mention that he was sure I was wondering why he was wearing a poppy. Frankly I’d never even given it a second thought as it was a commonplace thing in that it was in the period just coming up to the November 11th Remembrance Day when, of course, wearing poppies is fairly common. In fact it wasn’t until some time later that I found out that the poppy was considered by Republicans as a British symbol and therefore political thus something that he “shouldn’t” be wearing since he was a Catholic. I’m sure that I’m not the only one from the Scottish descent community who simply couldn’t understand this reasoning at all.

However, just a few days ago Wendy received this as a final statement on a comment on her blog “And for the record, Northern Irish people are not British.”. Well, actually as far as those of us of Scottish descent goes I don’t think anyone even considered that there was such a thing as “Northern Irish” and actually we ARE British (as indeed, at least legally, are those born in Northern Ireland who consider themselves Irish). It seems peculiar that someone living in Belfast could possibly think that nobody in Northern Ireland was British these days, but there you go.

When a show has been running for a while it generally needs a bit of a refresh to keep the viewers interested but in a change to this approach Big Brother has largely kept the same format but seems to have gone for a different approach in selecting the house mates this time around.

The relative balance from previous shows seems now to have been thrown out and instead what we have are essentially a collection of weirdos which, so far, doesn’t seem to be working overly well if Wendy’s reactions are anything to go by.

Now, I’ll grant you that the potential contestants applying to appear have also had to up the ante each year with their weirdness. After all, after a few years it take something really off the wall to attract the interest of the selection panel. Thus everyone seems to have tried to outdo everyone else in weirdness from names to lifestyles.

Is it going to end up being an interesting show though? Well, just about every random collection of people thrown together do tend to mesh after a while so this group will be no different and perhaps the very different viewpoints this time around will make it that little bit more interesting as the show gets underway.

Seemingly without fail, the social services people lurch from one extreme to another in how they treat cases.

Whilst they obviously failed Baby P very badly, they’re now in the process of going out of their way to fail the babies of Mr & Mrs N. Thanks to a joke remark from Mrs N it seems that the social services feel that the best thing to happen is that her children should be put up for adoption.

Oh, it’s not just the off-hand comment she made, of course. There’s the matter of her being angry that social services took her children from her so she clearly has anger issues. Why were they taken into care? That’s because the first time parents were having difficulty in looking after the premature twins. Well, if that’s the reason then I think that the social services people would be best to take ALL babies born to first-timers into care. What first-time parent could honestly say that they didn’t have trouble looking after their children in the early days?

Of course, as with Baby P, it’s the children that are getting the worst of this. In the critical early days after birth the twins only get to see their parents for ten hours a WEEK. That’s not nearly enough to establish a firm attachment and will almost certainly affect their later development.

Sure parents won’t be perfect carers at the off. How could they be? But they’re almost always the best possible carers that a newborn will ever have. It’s not right for social services to exercise this draconian power with such impunity. One hopes that disciplinary action will ensue WHEN they lose the case over this.

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.

Wouldn’t you like to have a personalised tour of the holiday destination that you’re going to rather than being herded around by some impersonal tour?

I’m sure that many people would but figure that it’s bound to be too expensive to do something like that so never give it another thought but there’s growing assembly of what are called “greeter networks” around the world which offer you the opportunity of just a personalised tour yet for no charge at all. How come? Well, it’s made up of a network of volunteers in each of the spots offering this service which is supported by a very small full-time administration to match up tourists and the local volunteers.

For example, if you’d like to see New York then the Big Apple Greeter Network can connect you with one of their volunteers who’ll give you a local’s view of the city. What you can’t do is to book them for days at a time (not yet anyway) but this is one way to see the city as a local does and you can always go to the big tourist draws on another day.

Sadly this service isn’t available everywhere yet but it’s currently available in Adelaide, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Houston, Lyon, Melbourne, Nantes, New York, Paris, Kent, The Hague and Toronto. You can check out the up to date list on the Global Greeter Network.

A very worthwhile endeavour and one way to actually connect with at least one person in the country you’re visiting.