I grew up in Galway city in an area called Bohermore and lived in a house amongst the settled community. I left school at a very early age barely able to read and write, and worked at various jobs in Ireland and the UK from 1971 to 1974. Some of the work I did was with farmers and builders.
In 1974, I returned home and joined the Army with the 1st Battalion in Galway, where I served for four years. I left the Army four years later and returned to the UK, picking potatoes and working on building sites in Scotland, Manchester, Birmingham and London. I met many others from all walks of life doing these jobs. After a number of years, it became a routine; I had no real direction or focus.
Married now, I returned to Galway in 1992. In 1996, a friend mentioned that there was a Traveller support group in the city. He said it had a Community Employment Scheme up and running and was looking for people to participate in it. At first, I wasn't interested in joining another Traveller project that had no real point to it. Other Traveller groups at that time were quite static, offering no new skills or job training. Instead, they were training people in more traditional skills, for which fewer and fewer jobs were available.
I joined the group and found it was very different in that it was about self-development and community development. I started participating in my first Community Employment Scheme in October 1996. After the first week, I knew the training I could get would help me in the work I wanted to do. This emphasis on relevance is central to the group's aim of achieving full equality for Travellers and the broader participation of Travellers in social, economic, political and cultural life.
Four years on, I have participated in a number of courses, including adult literacy, video production, pre-community development and community development practice, justice and peace, and computing.
I would not have had the confidence to take up such training before I joined the Galway Traveller Support Group. It gave me the encouragement to learn new skills and to reach my potential. This was something that I did not experience in my childhood, as there was no encouragement or support at that time for Travellers or other people living in marginalised circumstances.
The Citizen Traveller campaign will, I hope, help settled and Traveller communities to become aware of each other as individuals and as human beings, finding out what makes us tick, what makes us laugh or cry, our hopes and our dreams - basically, the way we live our lives.