Right-wing populist governments with designs on capturing the state and fascism, such as Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s are, are bringing home the shock doctrine consecutive US and British governments have employed on their foreign interventionist adventures since the US-backed coup and military takeover of Chile in 1973. This is the neoliberal dream; to see powerful and cohesive democracies softened up by truncheons, rent asunder by socio-economic division, and fractured into thousands of squabbling factions of the oppressed.
Towards the Recovery of Pavee History
The most significant, popularly held assumption of Traveller origins is that voiced in the 1952 Folklore Commission of Ireland which concluded on thin evidence that today’s Pavees “are descended from Irish peasants forced onto the roads, most significantly as a result of the Great Famine of the 1840s.”
You Better Get Born in Some Place Else
In Dublin, and all over Ireland, the plight of the Travellers is more immediate; more visible. There are more Travellers here; more purpose built housing, more halting sites, and more visible prejudice and open discrimination. This is not to say that things are better in Scotland.
Random Public Journal 