In the main park in Bucharest, on a footbridge over the artificial lake, sits a man with a small barrel organ and two green canaries. He is there every weekend, winding the handle and sending out a melancholic tune, warped on the breeze. The park is always full of couples who will stop and give him money, allow the budgies to peck out their fortune from a box of pink cards and then walk away arm-in-arm, laughing to themselves.
This is one of the many images of gypsies, or Roma people; an enduring one that reminds you of how they came from India seven centuries ago as coppersmiths and fortune tellers, arriving in an era when the traveller was feted in Europe. There are many more images - of poverty, of ostentatious wealth, of life lived on the surface. The gypsies fall easily into cliches and are much maligned across Europe as pathological thieves, living in inhuman conditions, sending their children out to beg. While I lived in Romania, they even accused them of mutilating their own children to improve their chances.
The gypsies are dogged by rumours and stereotypes. German television stations regularly broadcast documentaries about gangs of gypsy men driving through the night in convoys of Mercedes, to attack sleepy villages in southern Germany; either that or gangs of Schlepper, refugee smugglers. In Vienna they are known for eating the swans on the Danube. France regularly repatriates them, by return post.
In Bucharest, where they are frequently linked to corruption and Mafia racketeering, a leading gypsy was set free by a judge amid public outrage after he had chopped off a policeman's hand. In the Czech republic, where Vaclav Havel once announced that gypsies are the litmus test of a civil society, the Czechs are now erecting walls and barbed wire fences, and throwing curfews around gypsy camps; not unlike limited internment.
How must the Roma feel arriving to Irish hospitality in Wexford, now that their welcome has run out elsewhere? Here they have a clean slate. A new start. Unless, of course, the Irish people import the same rumours and prejudice. Unless we greet them with the familiar, homegrown innuendo that we show towards the Irish travelling community.
An even bigger question facing Ireland is whether requests for political asylum should be taken seriously. Are they being persecuted at home? Certainly, the Romanian state does not pursue an active policy of legislative repression against the gypsies, but the scars of oppression still run deep. The gypsy lifestyle is very much under threat. And in the opening years of post-communist Romania, they suffered evictions and vicious arson attacks in villages all around the country. Whether this was a social adjustment after communist oppression, or part of an ingrained hatred for gypsies remains to be seen. In Ireland, the confusion would soon disappear if we adopted a positive immigration policy, instead of treating the Romanian immigrants as we treated the haemorrhage of Irish emigrants a decade ago.
If only economic maturity was matched by social maturity. Since the revolution, the Romanian state has been pulling itself together into a credible democracy. With its extraordinary range of resources, it has the potential to become one of the most prosperous nations in Europe, if only, like Ireland, the people could at times break away from their own historical legacy.
Four centuries ago, the gypsies became slaves and continued to be bought and sold in grotesque conditions until 1856. This may explain why Romania now has the largest number of European gypsies, about 2.5 million, or 15 per cent of the entire population. During the Nazi period, the gypsies were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This was followed by the communist era during which they were forcibly resettled and integrated from 1947 onwards. Things got worse under Ceaucescu's systematisation policy, when thousands of villages were razed, when the securitate stole the gold coins out of gypsy women's clothes and hair, and brutally housed them in large apartment blocks alongside the resentful Romanians.
The gypsies themselves do little to stem the flow of rumours. Throughout the communist era, they continued to trade and import from Turkey, stealing a march on the Romanians by the time the revolution came. Some of them quickly became wealthy through car dealing and other new businesses. In the medieval Transylvanian town of Sibiu, I saw the openly displayed wealth of the self-proclaimed king of the gypsies, Jon Cioaba. His cousin, living on the same street in an even bigger house, claims to be the emperor of all the gypsies. They both drive big cars and wear big gold rings, and fought each other in the street recently, in a very public fracas.
At the Red Dragon bar in Bucharest, a band of droll, sad-eyed men in black suits played on a stage with a sixfoot portrait of Ceaucescu behind them. This was in 1995, and I couldn't work out if it was a joke, or some kind of lingering affinity with the late dictator. Perhaps, in spite of forced settlement, the gypsies had always been safe under Ceaucescu. Perhaps he was their protector in a perverse way, putting them into flats vacated in the 1980s by the Germans who were being repatriated by the German government.
With no heating in the canyons of high-rise blocks, it's no wonder they light fires in the streets. They are often perceived as anarchists and impossible neighbours, living in a stateless society, or more like a state within a state; a people who will never quite achieve self-determination or full assimilation. Given their long history of oppression, it is no surprise either that they have little time for Gadjo (stranger) laws. The women in colourful dresses sell what they can at markets. You rarely see caravans because few are still nomadic.
Along the road towards the Black Sea, they stand by the kerb and hold out their arms to indicate the size of the out-of-season sturgeon they can sell you. In the villages and towns of Transylvania, copper vats and distilling utensils are for sale. In one town I saw a woman carrying her husband on her back because his two legs had been amputated. Outside Sighisuara, there was a very poor riverside encampment with no electricity or motor transport; a man taunted a screaming child with a stick, while a woman holding a baby stared into the distance. Near Iasi you could see tall men in black suits and black hats, more reminiscent of the Blasket writer, Tomas O Chriomhthain.
On the train back from Sibiu at Christmas, groups of Roma children got on at stations to sing carols at high speed before they were thrown off again and the train moved on. One of the children stayed on the train. In the middle of winter, she stood in the corridor outside my compartment, wearing a thin jumper, jeans and pink tennis shoes. She too had the sad-eyed look, and before I could give her something, the female conductor pushed her along the corridor and proceeded to shout and beat her around the head.
She cried for a bit, but then suddenly stopped, as if she was used to it. I was shocked to think that the conductor might have done this on my behalf. On the platform in Bucharest's Garra de Nord, I caught up with the girl and gave her money, the equivalent of 40 pence, I remember - an outrageous sum according to my Romanian friends and colleagues. Did I not know this money was going straight to the Mafia? Did I not know they operated begging rings? Did I not know this girl probably hadn't paid her fare?
It is hard to separate the cliches from history. It's hard to judge one incident like this, in the same way that it is hard to see any European country in isolation any more. We are glad that trade boundaries are disappearing. National borders are evaporating. And if we continue to be good Europeans, then sooner or later we must also see ourselves as a part of this story. The gypsy story is a litmus test for Ireland too.
Hugo Hamilton is a novelist whose forthcoming novel, Sad Bastard, is due from Secker and Warburg in September. He worked as a writer-in-residence at the University of Bucharest from 1995 to 1996