by Parris Afton Bonds
Cultural appropriation? Irish Travellers are not Roma Gypsies
By MoHurley on May 12, 2018
I'm a little more than concerned that Irish Travellers, who are NOT, I repeat, NOT Roma, in any way, shape or form, are conflated into this story.
There are a handful of Roma people in Ireland, it's a recent migration, but we're talking less than 3000 people in all of Ireland, in 2004, the census was 1700 Roma people.
The real Irish Travellers, formerly called Tinkers, probably date back to Neolithic times. But they are ethnically Irish. Today there are about 10,000 to 40,000 Travellers in Ireland. There is one school of thought that the Travellers arose as a distinct class of people during the Cromwellian, and/or during the Famine. Some Irish Travellers immigrated to Scotland, as well as to America. Eddie Izzard portrays an American Irish Traveller grifter in "The Riches."
Irish Travellers are NOT Roma. Recent DNA analysis has proven this beyond a doubt. It's bad enough that Irish cobb horses are now called Gypsy vanners, and this latest conflation will only serve to further confuse people. Cultural appropriation at its worst. Just don't.
The author writes: "True gypsies, Romany folk and Irish Travellers, were adept at storytelling. For a thousand years, although most of the Gypsy clans could neither read no write, they had kept historical records of their odyssey by word of mouth." Bonds then conflates Roma with Travellers. She couldn't be more wrong. She makes no attempt to untangle the two distinctly genetically different peoples. Being itinerant does not make them upper case Gypsies.
"The [DNA] study clearly showed there was no significant genetic contribution made by Roma Gypsies to Traveller DNA. This disproves a view held by some that the two groups were genetically related." —Irish Times
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