The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People

Book Description

This edition of The Irish Tinkers focuses on the Tinkers' attempts to cope with the changes that the development and modernization of rural Ireland have forced upon them. Gmelch lucidly describes the Tinkers' cityward migration, their adaptation to their new urban environment, and the drive by government and others to settle them. The Tinkers represent a classic case of a small, powerless society struggling to cope with a new lifestyle that threatens to overwhelm them.

Customer Reviews:

Somewhat pedantic.......2004-02-06

I first learned about the Travelers at the time of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, when Dateline did a documentary on the American line of the Irish migrants. The producers seemed more interested in "looping," a Traveler mating ritual, than anything else. Shiny, sequenced-dressed preteens with bouffant hairdos and makeup were eerily similar to the child beauty queen.
George Gmelch, an American anthropologist, spent a number of years living with the Travelers at Holylands, a Traveler haven in Dublin. This book is a compilation of that research. In it we learn that the Travelers were originally Tinkers or tinsmiths who wandered throughout Ireland looking for work, relying on farm families. They also did a bit of begging and outright stealing on the side, hence their nefarious reputation. During the potato famine of the 1840's up to a million Irish starved and another million emigrated, some Travelers among them. Those that stayed experienced difficulties after WWII when farming became mechanized and the need for tinkers decreased.
Gmelch's book concentrates on the Irish government's attempts to settle the Travelers in permanent housing. They ran into difficulties with settled Irish because of their penchant for scavenging scrap metal and begging. Like other minorities the Travelers did not adjust well to public housing, but did much better when given an opportunity to purchase their own homes.
According to Gmelch the Travelers are family oriented, unwilling to trust anyone outside the immediate family. They also have an adversarial relationship with the settled Irish, who look down on them because of their lack of education and their enthusiasm for drink. This results in a bit of one-upmanship during horse trading and such.
Probably because of Gmelch's academic background, much of the writing is pedantic, kind of surprising when we're talking about some of the most interesting and humorous people I've ever heard of. He does, however, reveal some of the reasons why the American Travelers behave the way they do. For instance, many Travelers in Ireland marry close relations and we see the reason for this in their distrust of everyone, including unrelated Travelers.
This book involves Gmelch's sojourn at Holylands between July 1971 and September 1972 and a return trip in 1975 which lasted four months. Gmelch includes an Update outlining the status of the Travelers as of 1984. As of 1984, more Travelers were dependent on welfare than on scavenging. Horses were almost gone and more families relied on cars and vans. Begging was also in decline. As of 1981 only fifty percent of Travelers were living in trailer caravans. Forty-six percent were living in houses or chalets.
Many Travelers resist the government's efforts to settle them in public housing, preferring their independent, wandering lifestyle. As of 2003, during a visit to Ireland, I witnessed them parked in their caravans alongside country roads.

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A poignant and beautiful testament to a vanished way of life

Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More
Alen MacWeeney
Manufacturer: New England College
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0979013003

Book Description

In 1965, Alen MacWeeney came upon an encampment of itinerants in a waste ground by the Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital outside Dublin. Then called tinkers and later formally styled Travellers by the Irish Government, they were living in beatup caravans, ramshackle sheds, and time-worn tents. MacWeeney was captivated by their independence, individuality, and en durance, despite their bleak circumstances.

Clearly impoverished, Travellers were alienated--partly by choice--from greater Irish society. They lived catch-as-catch-can. Traditionally, tinkers had been tinsmiths and pot menders; always, they had been horse traders, and they continued to keep some piebald horses. They worked now and again as turf-cutters or chimney sweeps. The women begged in the streets of Dublin and large towns; some told fortunes. They were not welcomed in the country towns of Ireland, where they set up their encampments in lay-bys and cul-de-sacs, littering the roadsides with their waste, hanging their washing on bushes. To Alen MacWeeney, they recalled the migrant farmers of the great American Depression--poor, white, and dispossessed--as the government attempted to get them off the roads of Ireland and gather them in settlements. Although they had been eligible for the dole since 1963, the tinkers--become--Travellers cherished their wayward, ancestral lifestyle.

Already noted in the United States as a photographer of great sensitivity, MacWeeney became accepted by the Travellers and began to photograph them. In a moving essay in the book, he writes: "Theirs was a bigger way of life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life." Over five years, he spent countless evenings in the Travellers' caravans and by their campfires, drinking tea and listening to their tales, songs, and music - "rarely shared or exposed to camera and tape recorder."

Customer Reviews:

A poignant and beautiful testament to a vanished way of life.......2007-10-11

A very important body of photographs -- both artistic and historic -- framed by a text of the Travelling people's stories and a compact disc of the people in the book performing their music, over forty years ago. A testament to a great photographer's determination that brings to life a part of Ireland's immemorial past which has vanished in our lifetimes.

Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman

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Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman
Stripped of sentimentality, harsh reality conveyed
Review of Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman
A well-written story about a fascinating destiny

Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman
Sharon Gmelch
Manufacturer: Waveland Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0881336025

Book Description

Nan Donohoe was an Irish Travelling woman, one of Ireland's indigenous gypsies or "tinkers." Traditionally, they traveled the countryside making and repairing tinware, sweeping chimneys, selling small household wares, and doing odd-job work. Today, they live on the roadside in trailers and in government-built camps. Told largely in her own voice, Nan's saga begins in 1919 with her birth in a tent in the Irish Midlands; it follows her life in Ireland and England, in countryside and city slums, through adversity and adventure. Gmelch brings to her task not only the resources of anthropology, but the skill of a sensitive writer and a warmth that allows her to see Nan as a person, not a subject. What emerges is a human story, filled with cruelty and compassion, sorrow and humor, bad luck and good.

Customer Reviews:

Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman.......2006-11-05

A very interesting and heartrending book. While as an Irish person I regularly saw Tinkers, as they were called, their lives were somewhat remote from mine. Through this book, and Nan's experience, I was taken into the heart of their lives and and was able to view with compassion their struggle to survive. In the days when villages were isolated, they provided a needed service to communities such as sweeping chimneys. However, with modern communications, the Tinker's services and wares were no longer needed. They gravitated to the cities in search of work and became scrap merchants, fortune tellers, and beggers, becoming a nuisance to residents, and they were largely ostricized. Yet, while the older Travelling People yearn for the open skies and freedom from the confines of the cities and a settled life, but this is no longer a viable lifestyle. Nan preferred her children to have a settled life.

Stripped of sentimentality, harsh reality conveyed.......2005-05-07

Sharon Gmelch's work, published originally in 1986, emerged from her anthropological doctoral studies conducted along with her husband George's concurrent work into the urbanisation of the travellers. She enters Nan's tales delicately, bringing you as a reader in and out of Nan's anecdotes occasionally before taking again the thread of her long and detailed recollections of a life spent largely outside the confines of city life, but, it is to be noted, increasingly becoming settled within the urban life that takes over for millions of Irish in the latter part of the 20th c., from whatever rural background or tradition.

The highlights of this account I found were in her service for Major Evans at Gretton House in Northants. In this quintessentially British country home, she worked her way up from being a kitchen maid, and her vignettes capture movingly her ability to, being illiterate, to live by her wits. Her subsequent return to Ireland, one senses, was not wished for, even though it brought her back to her traveller lifestyle. For her childhood, as with too many of her own 18 children, she shows how elastic the bonds are between parents and offspring (despite the often asserted claim that for travellers family ties come first), as some of her own children found themselves sent off to institutions to be raised.

The most intriguing section next was how she met her match in trying to survive as a totally untutored fortune-teller in 1940s Conamara, since she could only barter her wares rather than be paid for them from women as poor as she was! After that, the weariness of surviving wears her down into a much older-looking woman than she was when Gmelch met her in the 1970s. Abusive husbands, unending pregnancies, exhausting hustles, and life spent on the road or in substandard housing left her wiped out.
Drink and violence--at one point she casually gives as an aside the fact her husband broke her nose--belie the carefree proto-hippie romanticism that rose-tinted a harsh, gray, and lonely life. (No index and a lack of detailed notes cut this book down a star, however).

A good follow-up is Gmelch's 1976 general account, Tinkers and Travellers, which documents Nan's testimony and that of others, often camped at Holylands near Dublin. George Gmelch wrote a more theoretical, less engaging study of the Travellers, and Jane Helleiner offers more recent scholarly work from 2001.

Review of Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman.......2001-06-21

I have used this book several times in anthropology classes I teach and this coming fall I am going to use it again. I think of it as a classic because it addresses so many important aspects of a good life history. First, it represents the everyday life of a person living in poverty, an area worthy of academic study. It is also a close study of how women are sometimes, and in some societal situations, subject to abuse and have little recourse. Then, this study is also an interesting look at how historical changes influence the lives of people, in this case the travellers who used to make their living as tin smiths and horse traders and are now forced to adapt to an urban and highly technical world. The book is beautifully written and has always been well received by students

A well-written story about a fascinating destiny.......1998-05-09

This books gives an excellent insight in the life-style of the Irish travellers, as well as it is an enjoyable read. The main character, Nan, is a woman from a travelling family, living like nomads in the developping Ireland that is becoming more and more modern around them. Her life is very harsh, and harsher than the normal life of a travelling person, as the author points out. Nonetheless, or maybe just because of that, it is a gripping story and its contains are very interesting. You don't only get a good read, you also get a good and interesting lesson in the subsociety of the Irish travellers, a group that to a large extent maintains their nomadic lifestyle up to this day.

Irish Travellers: Representations and Realities

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Irish Travellers: Representations and Realities
Michael Hayes
Manufacturer: Dufour Editions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1904148794

A Traveller's History of Ireland (Traveller's History Series)

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Not a traveler's history, but OK
Needs less history, more travel

A Traveller's History of Ireland (Traveller's History Series)
Peter Neville
Manufacturer: Interlink
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1566566371

Book Description

A Traveller's History of Ireland gives a full and accurate portrait of Ireland from its prehistory right up to the present. The story opens with mysterious, early Celtic Ireland where no Roman stood, through Saint Patrick's mission to Ireland, which began the process of making it "an island of saints," to the legendary high King Brian Boru and his struggle with Viking and Irish enemies alike.

It moves on through the arrival of the Norman "strongbow" in the twelfth century, and the beginnings of the difficult and tragic Anglo-Irish relationship. The book then moves into modern times with the great revolts of 1798, the horrors of the potato famine, and the careers of the leading constitutional nationalists, Daniel O'Connell and Charles Parnell. The book ends with a description of modern Ireland and of its two separate Catholic Nationalist and Protestant Unionist traditions.

"This book will be appreciated by visitors who want more historical background than ordinary series guidebooks supply... Highly recommended..." -Library Journal

"For independent, inquisitive travelers traversing the green roads of Ireland, there is no better guide than A Traveller's History of Ireland." -Small Press

Customer Reviews:

Not a traveler's history, but OK.......2006-10-20

This interesting little book is a history of Ireland, pure and simple - there is nothing particularly different for the traveler than any other Irish history book. As a history book, I did find this book to have a good deal of information, covering everything from prehistoric Ireland to the contemporary scene.

Now, as already said, this book has nothing in particular to offer the traveler, so if you are looking for that, you will be disappointed. As a history book, this book is somewhat disappointing because the author does not maintain objectivity about his subject. For example, when discussing the massacres of Protestants in 1641, the author minimizes the claims of losses and challenges the objectivity of the witnesses. But, when he comes to the massacres committed by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 he does not similarly challenge the historic record.

Well, am I saying that this is a bad book? No, in point of fact, I did find this to be a highly informative and interesting read. The author does a good job of covering Irish history in a smooth and interesting manner.

So, if you are looking for a good history book for the traveler, then don't get this book. If you are looking for an objective and clear-eyed book on Irish history...then don't get this book. But, if you are looking for a short, but highly informative book on Irish history, then you will enjoy this book. Just know what you are getting.

Needs less history, more travel.......2001-07-20

Starry-eyed and with a deep-seated love of the history of the place even before I had set foot there, I travelled to Paris after graduating university, armed not only with the obligatory budget guide to hostels and el-cheapo cafes, but with a last-minute find: "A Traveller's History of Paris". It was fabulous. Not only could I bore my travelling companion to tears photographing every angle of every building, but I could also talk her ear off from Notre Dame to the Louvre, recounting the historical anecdotes and trivia that went with each site.

I was looking forward to much the same when I ordered "A Traveller's History of Ireland". And from the point of view of history, this book certainly strives for thoroughness. However, in the end I left this one at home because it told me very little about specific histories of specific sites that I intended to visit throughout Ireland. Certainly it makes an effort, with the historical gazetteer at the back, to link the history to the geography; however, as a traveller, I much prefer to have the *places* enumerated and detailed than the periods.

As a history of Ireland, this book is not even that inspiring. Rather dry and sometimes pedantic, it lacks the lyrical energy that so informs the Irish love-affair with the written and spoken word. To get a sense of the flavour of Ireland's history, you'd do far better to read such personal accounts as Frank McCourt's deservedly popular memoirs, or the alternately funny and heart-rending novels of Roddy Doyle. For the romantic, browse Yeats' poems; for the ancient, explore the rich Irish folklore and mythology. Any of these will give you a better feel for the country and its spirit than this book, detailed and scholarly as it is.

Book Description

The history of Italy is central to the European experience. Through the supremacy of Rome, Italy enjoyed its greatest influence, as Roman power stretched from the Atlantic to the borders of Mesopotamia, and from the Scottish Lowlands to the Sahara Desert. A Traveller's History of Italy moves from Italy's pre-historic, and Etruscan civilizations, through the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the creation of modern Italy, fascism and World War II, and the role of Italy in today's Europe, right up to the present.

Customer Reviews:

Misnomer - nothing here for the "traveller".......2007-04-14

If this book had been called "A brief history of Italy", I'd have given it four stars. As a short but reasonably thorough overview of Italian history, it does a pretty good job.

But as for being a "traveller's history"...it fails. I was planning a trip to Italy and wanted a book that would tell me the history behind the things I was seeing ("And on your left, you see a statue from the early 16th century..."). As such, this book is useless. Its historical content is in no way geared towards the traveler.

If you want a quick read on Italian history, great. But don't take it on your travels.

Good background for those who know nothing about Italian His.......2000-09-15

It's a lot of information to absorb, but overview of the development of modern Italy is interesting. As someone who knew little of the history of Italy, the book enriched my travel experiences in Italy. The timelines are a good reference. There could be better maps for those of us who are unfamiliar with Italian geography. Unfortunately, the book is poorly bound and my copy fell apart almost immediately.

A Travelers History of Ireland (Traveller's History)

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A Travelers History of Ireland (Traveller's History)
Nezille
Manufacturer: Interlink Pub Group Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Wild Ireland: A Traveller's Guide (Wild Guides)

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Magical Ireland

Wild Ireland: A Traveller's Guide (Wild Guides)
Brendan Lehane
Manufacturer: Interlink Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Brendan Lehane reveals in his witty and informative book that wild places still exist in rich abundance in Ireland. You can climb a mountain, bathe in a sea, watch thousands of birds co-existing on off-shore stacks, fish for salmon with a good chance of catching one, and hear the dusk calls of the corncrake at a river's reedy mouth all in a day.

Wild Ireland offers something different from general guidebooks. It takes you far beyond Dublin and the other popular tourist destinations such as Cork, Galway, and County Kerry, spiriting you away to the remotest sea-cliffs, secret valleys and mountain lakes, in Northern Ireland as well as the Republic. If you want to be an armchair traveller, Wild Ireland will entertain and entrance you for hours with word pictures and color photographs. If you like the sound of a place, look in the accompanying fact-pack and you will find everything you need to plan a journey, arrange a fishing vacation, book accommodation or work out the stages for a long-distance walk. Specially drawn maps will enable you to find all the author's favorite spots.

Customer Reviews:

Magical Ireland.......2006-03-30

This book was instrumental in our Honeymoon. We wanted to experience Ireland and the people and the communities. We saw so many wonderful towns and scenic sights its impossible to pick one highlight. Every recommendation was accurate. Purchase this book before you plan your trip to Ireland

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