The groups of nomadic peoples that are increasingly well known for their home improvement scams are known as the Irish Travelers. Over the years they have been the subject of various news stories and exposes. Almost exclusively the coverage they receive revolves in some way around a new bunco crime being perpetrated among citizens. The origins and traditions of this small clan, the types of crimes they engage in, and some of the more prominent of their schemes can be helpful in insulating oneself against victimization.
The Irish Travelers began arriving in the United States during the Great Famine in Ireland in the mid 19th century. It is believed they are descendants of landowners and laborers who were displaced by Oliver Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland in the 1600’s. As they maintain no written records of their history, their true heritage is still of some debate. Arriving in this country they were known as the Irish Horse Traders for their dealings in the horse trading industry. It has been suggested that as far back as their arrival they were engaging in schemes to defraud potential customers.
This clan of Roman Catholics live by a strict ethos they call the “Traveler Code”. No known written code exists, except perhaps amongst the clan itself. They have a separate and distinct lifestyle in which they rarely associate with outsiders, whom they call “country people”. If in the presence of country people, the Travelers speak an ancient Gaelic-derived language called Cant. They marry within their own group, they seldom receive an education beyond elementary school and secrecy is a way of life for the Travelers. (Dateline NBC)
The largest community of Irish Travelers in the United States is known as Murphy Village a...
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Duke, L. (2002, October 20). Unwelcome stares at quiet clan. Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.rickross.com/reference/irish_travelers/irish_travelers10.html
McIlvain, J. (2002, September 23). Irish travelers' scams. Retrieved from http://troubleshooterjudd.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33:irish-travelers-scams&catid=8:home-remodeling-topics&Itemid=5
Ripley, A. (2002, October 07). Unwelcome exposure. TIME, Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003381,00.html
Roeper, R. (2002, September 24). Mom brings baggage from Irish travelers. Retrieved from http://www.rickross.com/reference/irish_travelers/irish_travelers5.html
Throne, K. (2001, June 1). Seven Irish travelers charged with fraud. The Augusta Chronicle. Retrieved from http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2001/06/01/met_310376.shtm
Cahill begins his discussion of the Irish people in an extensive reference to Medh, the Queen of Connacht. Through her story we are first shown the aggressive spirit and strength of the Irish people. As Cahill relays, no barbarian tribe or nation was feared like the Irish when it came to the slave trade, and it is through this vein of interaction- the slave trade- that a young man by the name of Patricius is introduced to the realm of Unholy Ireland. Taken from his home in Romanized Briton, he is subject to several years of slavery in the most unsavory of conditions. These conditions serve as a catalyst for his spiritual enlightenment and ultimately that of the Irish peoples (38).
Immigration to America from Europe was at an all time high in the mid-1800s. After the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s, a large group of Irish immigrated to the United States. Since then, increasing numbers of Irish people have been moving to the United States, especially in Chicago. The Irish had come to realize that the United States really is the land of opportunity. With jobs being available to the immigrants, many more shipped in to start new lives for their families. However, for quite a while they did not live in the nicest of areas in Chicago. Many of the Irish resided in low-class areas such as overcrowded parts around the Loop, and out in the West Side. Not only did the West Side shelter the Irish, but many Germans and Jews lived in that area.
The first thing that we will look at is the Irish demographics. The Irish population had fluctuated tremendously over the years. When looking at where they came from, the highest group seems to have been coming from Dublin and Nothern Ireland, along with Kerry County, Ireland as well. Previous to the the 1840's, there were two other waves of Irish immigration in the US. According to the Colombia Guide to Irish American History, the first of the Irish immigrants came in the 1500's due to Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition and the population has continued to grow even since. The third wave began in the 1840's. From census data from US during the Gilded Age, in the 1860's the total number of Irish born immigrants were 22,926. Throughout this time, until around 1910, that number decreased. The number of I...
Irish Catholics were not welcome in America because of their different traditions which caused conflicts within the communities. Nativists were one of the main groups who
Looking for a better life away from death, oppression, and destruction the Irish headed to America by the thousands in the 1840’s. Ireland’s staple food was the potato, it was the main means of subsistence for the poor. Then in the 1840’s cataclysm struck, the potato blight caused famine, disease, death and despair. Close to a million deaths were blamed on the potato blight in Ireland. The potato blight was caused by a disease that rendered the potatoes inedible. It lasted for several years, from 1845-1849 the country suffered great hardships, sickness, and death. The blight was the final straw to push many immigrants out of Ireland and to America looking for a chance of survival (Marger, 2015, pg. 284)
The life of Irish immigrants in Boston was one of poverty and discrimination. The religiously centered culture of the Irish has along with their importance on family has allowed the Irish to prosper and persevere through times of injustice. Boston's Irish immigrant population amounted to a tenth of its population. Many after arriving could not find suitable jobs and ended up living where earlier generations had resided. This attributed to the 'invisibility' of the Irish.
men who found jobs as laborers in the North and Northeast (Purcell 32). Although these were low paying jobs, they were still better than what they had in Ireland. Another thing typical of the Irish immigrants in the pre-famine years was something called the chain migration (Purcell 36). The first immigrants found jobs, saved most or all of their money, and sent money or tickets for sailing on the ships to relatives in the old country. By very hard work, immigrants made it possible to pay for their entire family to follow them to America. To save up all of the passage money was very difficult but
Our journey begins, with the, so-called “Castle Document”. This was a forged document, supposedly having been leaked from British Intelligence in Dublin Castle in an attempt to force Eoin Mac Neill and the Irish Volunteers to join the p...
John Doyle wrote of the struggles that the Irish immigrants have to face in America for their first six months in the new world. Little did he know that in a couple of decades, the Irish population of America would increase almost fivefold. The story that he would tell of his immigration would be strikingly different than the stories of the nearly 700,000 refugees that would make the voyage across the Atlantic thirty years after he did. The conditions for the Irish Catholics in America would all but get better.
Such was the environment in which droves of Irish immigrants sought to better their lives and those of their children by fleeing their homeland with its disastrous potato famines, and economic, political and religious repression. There are today descendants of the Goodwin families living in the Pawtucket area. There is certainly every likelihood that living today in Tyrone are many distant cousins.
Irish immigrants influenced American history and culture in many ways. For example, many Americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day because of the Irish population in America. Many famous Irish represented America worldwide such as President Kennedy. However, for all of the successes to occur, many immigrants struggled to establish the position and respect that Irish maintain in society today. From struggles in the coffin ships to the racial embarrassment faced with discrimination, our history is a reflection of the decisions made in the last century by the Irish immigrants in the
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. N.d. TS. Swift, "" Web. 30 Nov. 2013. .
This paper will investigate the culture of Ireland by taking a look at the five characteristics. Each characteristic will be allotted its own subsections. The first section will encompass the history to illuminate the connection of a country’s struggle and their learned culture. I will communicate the key aspects that connect an individual culture to the region of the world it inhabits in the second section. In the third section, the language and art of the land are discussed to draw lines to the symbols a culture is founded upon. The fourth section of the essay is dedicated to the characteristic of culture being made up of many components. This is illustrated by the ethnicity/racial, weather, terrain, and military breakdown of the island. The final section is commentary on the dynamic characteristic that interacting cultures learn, develop, and transform due to their shared contact and friction.
The Travellers, a minority community indigenous to Ireland, have existed on the margins of Irish society for centuries. They share common descent, and have distinct cultural practices - early marriage, desire to be mobile, a tradition of self-employment, and so on. They have distinct rituals of death and cleansing, and a language they only speak among their own. Travellers are not overtly conscious of a sense of group history. Concern with ancestry is an obsession of those who value permanence of place. Rather, the individual is defined by his/her place within the relationship network. They live in extended patriarchal families, prefer trailers, tend to nomadism interspersed with occasional house dwelling, and maintain a nomadic mindset even when settled; a house is considered only a stopping place between journeys, whether the stop lasts 20 days or 20 years! There are an estimated 21,000 Travellers currently living in the Republic of Ireland, over half of whom have no access to toilet facilities, electricity, refuse collection or piped water.