Michael Francis Ward was 11 when he first entered the prison system. As a schoolchild, he said he often faced discrimination due to being a Traveller. He was told he wasn’t allowed to play GAA at the local club; while in school, he faced bullying.
This, he said, led to him feeling quite paranoid: about people, about education, about life. Without an outlet, he began to hang around with the “wrong crowd”.
“And then I’d get locked up and put into a cell and even as a young fella, it wasn’t nice. I was hyperactive. I liked to keep going and being locked in a room just played on my mind,” he said.
“My mind started functioning differently. Paranoia came in, it was paranoia from school, from my upbringing and then being locked in a room. You kind of start talking to yourself. And back then if you were talking to yourself you were sick, you were mad.”
The 42-year-old father of six was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic when he was in prison. However, the diagnosis “made me worse”, he said.
“That was horrible. I have two family members who have mental health issues and who died in mental health services. Seeing what they went through and then being put into that same box, it was horrible,” he said.
“It diagnosed me with a mental health issue but I had nobody to help me. In prison, you can put your name down to see a counsellor, but your sentence is over by the time you see a counsellor. You can try to talk to a prison officer but they don’t know what they’re talking about, they say go see the counsellor.”
Members of the Travelling community are over-represented in prisons. Speaking before a UN Committee on Human Rights in 2022, Irish delegates said Travellers accounted for 0.7 per cent of the country’s population but made up 10 per cent of the general prison population and 15 per cent of the female prisoner population.
The situation has improved since then, with a spokesman for the Irish Prison Service saying that as of the end of May 2024, 8 per cent of the general prison population are Travellers.
A 2022 report from the University of Limerick found Travellers do not trust the Irish criminal justice system to treat them fairly, and that their mistrust is grounded in personal and shared experiences of unsatisfactory and sometimes biased treatment at the hands of criminal justice professionals, as victims and suspects.
Those working with Travellers say mental health remains a taboo issue, meaning for many people struggling with mental, illnesses go untreated. This can sometimes lead to crimes resulting in them receiving custodial sentences.
Caroline O’Reilly, addiction counsellor at Exchange House Ireland National Travellers Service, said on the ground, there are high rates of suicide within the Travelling community.
“Over the years, we’d be seeing generational mental health issues, generational trauma, and then I suppose, the poverty aspect and the marginalisation makes it hard for people to access services,” she said.
O’Reilly said that some situations can spiral, leading to “a lot of paranoia and drug-induced psychosis” which, in some cases, can lead to repeated court appearances, barring orders or prison.
Michael Wolniak, a social worker with the same organisation, said in terms of mental illnesses among the Travelling community in the prison system, it is quite varied and ranges from depression and anxiety to the more severe and enduring diagnoses.
“I spoke with a person who was suicidal and had really severe depression outside of prison before and because they were brought into prison and were waiting for ages, for months, for support. This is a huge issue because they’re very understaffed,” he said.
The spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said the multidisciplinary team works directly with the mental health needs of those in custody, including Travellers.
“The Irish Prison Service primary healthcare team and psychological service as well as in-reach mental health services, provided by the HSE’s national forensic mental health service, involves the provision of weekly forensic mental health sessions that are led by consultant forensic psychiatrists, supported by non-consultant hospital doctors, community psychiatric nurses and social workers,” he said.
As a result of the generational trauma and discrimination, dual diagnosis is quite common, particularly among Traveller women, representatives said.
In Ireland, Irish Traveller women are 22 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Traveller women, according to a research paper entitled Minority Women Incarcerated: The Vulnerabilities of Traveller Women in the Irish Criminal Justice System. It found their risk of imprisonment is greater than Traveller men who are over-represented among male prisoners.
For Ann Marie Sweeney, her criminal behaviour, she said, was directly related to her addiction and depression.
“My first time I had an overdose was at the age of nine or 10. My first two overdoses I ended up in hospital. I think it was a cry for help more than anything else. I always knew I was trapped within myself. I was very paranoid. I didn’t trust the outside at all. The community rejected us from day one,” she said.
She developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol soon after she got married. Here is largely when her interactions began with the criminal justice system: “It started off with stealing, you had to do it sometimes to survive. At times, it kept me and my kids alive. That’s what most of my charges were.”
“I went into prison, I came out of it. I went into prison, I came out of it,” she added.
According to Sweeney, the impact of mental illness among the Travelling community is “brutal”.
“We have a lot more suicides and a lot more men and women going into jails; and we have a lot more of our younger generation going into crime and addiction because of their mental health and not understanding it,” she added.
Ber Grogan, Mental Health Reform’s policy and research manager, said the Travelling community is a cohort of people who are “falling through the gaps”.
There is still a stigma around mental illness here, she said. “The stigma is absolutely huge, and there’s a huge issue around self-stigma as well. If you have severe and enduring mental health difficulties, it’s a psychosocial disability.”
Another man, Frank*, said he was unable to tell anyone of his mental health difficulties as a young person as it would have affected his chances of marriage.
“I was about 16/17 when I really found myself getting depressed. As a Traveller, nobody was giving me their daughter to marry if I was depressed or as they called it ‘in the loony bin’,” he said.
“So my father and everyone became very good at hiding that I was depressed because you wouldn’t get married. And you would spoil your brothers getting married too.”
Frank, which is not his real name, drank a lot to cover his depression, he said. Later in life, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for a violent crime connected to a family feud. Here, his mental health difficulties really began to manifest.
“I would be screaming into the pillow because I wouldn’t want anybody to hear me. I would be mentally tortured. And then I’d come out after with a laugh and a smile on my face. Suicide was constantly on my mind, but I wouldn’t show it.”
The Samaritans can be contacted on freephone: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.ie
Supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in the Republic of Ireland in partnership with Headline, a Shine programme.
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