Racism against the Travelling community is not recent and was an integral part of the ethos and practice of the State from the 1920s, according to a Canadian academic.
Anti-Traveller sentiment and action was "actively fostered" by the local and national political leadership which was later charged with implementing a settlement policy, Prof Jane Helleiner of the department of sociology at Brock University, Canada, said at a lecture in Westport, Co Mayo, this week.
Prof Helleiner is due to give her address in Dublin tonight.
Prof Helleiner has studied the Traveller issue since 1983. She and her husband lived with Travellers in Galway city for nine months in 1986/1987 as part of her research. She is author of Irish Travellers - Racism and the Politics of Culture.
Speaking at a meeting organised by Pavee Point and the Mayo Travellers Support Group, Prof Helleiner quoted from local authority and Oireachtas records to support her thesis. The minority of politicians who distanced themselves from such racism tended to be members of the Labour Party and Clann na Poblachta, she said.
It was often claimed that anti-Traveller racism - and racism in general - was a relatively new or "aberrant" phenomenon in Irish life, she said.
In an exchange in the Dáil on February 4th, 1999, several deputies had stated that the "serious rift" between the Travelling and settled communities was relatively new, because Travellers were welcomed into communities "20 or 30 years ago".
However, this was not supported by historical evidence, the professor said, which was important to establish because "such inaccurate claims support models of a past homogeneous and non-racist Irish nation - an imagined nation often invoked by those who are resistant to contemporary demands for change".
Taking Galway as her case study, she said that demands for local government and police action against "gypsies" had been made by private home-owners throughout the 1920s. In 1925, the Galway Chamber of Commerce argued that Travellers posed a threat to the city's economic health, especially its tourist industry.
By the 1930s, Galway City Council had decided to take legal advice on the "camping of itinerants" and, by the 1940s, the local authority was attempting to enlist the help of the Department of Agriculture to have "gypsies" excluded from the city on the grounds that their horses were spreading foot- and-mouth disease.
This theme was taken up in the Oireachtas, she said.
Travellers were actively excluded from Galway city through evictions, prosecutions and denial of housing and there were also parallels in Mayo.
The dedicated efforts and commitment of those involved in the Traveller rights movement,she said, were "transforming the intellectual and policy landscape" in the field of ethnic and racial issues. Recent legislative changes on equality represented a significant and positive development, she added.
However, the 16 years since she had lived in a trailer with Travellers in Galway, there was much that had not changed.
The effect of continued discrimination was evident in disproportionate levels of poverty, low life expectancy and the high neo-natal and child mortality rate within the Traveller population, she said.
