When Missie Collins approached the then Eastern Health Board in the early 1990s saying she and other Traveller women wanted to bring primary healthcare to their community, officials told her “it won’t work”.
She recalls: “They said: ‘You’re not educated. You can’t read nor write. So Travellers going out talking to Travellers about health, it won’t work’.
“I got up from the table, I said we’d be back. The man said, ‘You’re not giving up are you, Missie?’ and I said, ‘No, because our need is greater than ever now. Our people are dying.’”
About a year later, in 1994, she and the Traveller support organisation Pavee Point won approval for a nine-month pilot for the first primary healthcare project for Travellers. It was in Finglas and saw Collins and 15 other Traveller women visit 85 families – in houses, on sites and by the side of the road – surveying them on their health and uptake of health services.
It was revolutionary in Ireland – primary healthcare being brought to a community in a way that understands its culture and way of life, by its own members. Thirty years on, it has has been replicated in 27 projects across the State.
Collins, now aged 78, will on Thursday receive an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin in recognition of more than three decades of pioneering work.
“The award, it means a lot to me, being a Traveller woman and at my age, and not being able to read and write, it’s a powerful thing,” she says. “Through all my campaigning and the other 15 women, I think we should all be rewarded in a way.”
Born in Co Westmeath, the eldest daughter in a family of 12 children, she describes “good memories” of travelling around the midlands. She says her parents, Bridget and Mick O’Leary, “made sure they looked after us best they could”.
“We’d go to the farmers’ house and get the vegetables, potatoes and eggs, and you’d restore back by doing something for them,” Collins says.
They moved to England in the 1960s, where she started working as a sewing-machinist in her teens. She married and had all but one of her eight children in Manchester, returning with them and her late husband, Thomas, to Finglas in 1991. She said she saw “the gap between Ireland and England” immediately in terms of Traveller housing and health.
After successfully campaigning for better housing on the Finglas site, Collins turned her energies to health outcomes.
“Travellers weren’t comfortable going into the health clinics,” she says. “The first site we went into was a field, going in to explain what we were going to do. [We told them] the children would get their development check. Some men said, ‘Ah we’re not into that kind of talk about health and all that.’ So we said, ‘Well you won’t know unless you go’. They were wary, but they knew well they could trust a Traveller.”
Collins played a key role in the landmark All Ireland Traveller Health survey. Carried out in conjunction with UCD in 2010, it was the first national census of Traveller health. She since has spoken at conferences on indigenous and marginalised people’s healthcare around the world and remains active as an advocate.
Despite improvements, Traveller health outcomes remain far behind those of the settled population. Life expectancy for Traveller women and men are 11 years and 15 years shorter respectively than those of settled people; Traveller infant mortality is almost five times higher; deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases are higher, and suicide rates are at least six times higher.
Collins points to “living conditions”, poverty and “discrimination” as factors, particularly on mental health.
“A lot needs to change,” she says. “Life for us is hard and tough. Why anyone else would make it harder to us I don’t know,” she says. “I hope now for the younger [Travellers], my grandchildren and all the lovely childers coming up – let them go to school, let them be respected, let them be able to get jobs and make a few bob and good lives.”
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