On a road in central Ireland, a horse-drawn wagon moves at the horse’s pace, lorries behind it. It belongs to one of the last families in the country still travelling this way. For some thirty years, the government has been trying to settle the Irish Travellers; by dint of promising them houses and social benefits, it has now settled almost all of them. The others meet at the Ballinasloe horse fair, or defend their caravans on a patch of waste ground in Dublin, waiting to be evicted.
Christophe crosses Ireland from west to east, over 500 kilometres; in Ballinasloe, the travellers, most of them settled, come back “to reconnect with tradition and try out a horse or two”.
“If only the State would let us put our caravans where we want, for two or three families”: all it offers them is a flat or a house.Kevin has been on the road for fifty years. A carpenter for twenty years in England, he went from one odd job to the next until the day when, in Wales, he saw people putting on shows; he told himself he could do it too. By bike, by bus, sometimes on foot, he travels around Ireland, some 5,000 kilometres a year, with his puppets: an Obama with no bottom, and the Teletubbies. He performs three days a week and decides on waking, Cork or Kerry, Galway or Dublin. “I’m at home everywhere.” Neither nomad nor Traveller, he calls himself a free man. He lost his mother at 10, his father at 18, the woman he loved at 21: “I lost everything in my life before it began.” The road has been like therapy, and he will never stop. In September, the country’s single people gather for a month in Lisdoonvarna, originally a festival for the region’s farmers, held for more than 150 years. In some twenty pubs, people dance from noon to one in the morning, and roughly 230 couples form each year.
Kevin met the eyes of the woman he loved when she was eleven and he was thirteen; he is “still just as much” in love.
“Sometimes I make quite a lot of money. Sometimes almost nothing”, says Kevin; that day, the puppets bring in about ten euros.In the centre of the country, Ireland forms a basin, and the road runs between two walls of vegetation. The Irish Travellers are said to come from Romania, or even India, or to have been born of the famine of the mid-19th century, which killed a million people. Chris, Toni, Sean and Thomas, for their part, were settled English people, from a family of landowners; as the second-born, Chris was thrown out some twenty years ago, just as he had started a family. They chose the wagon, then flight. Toni has had enough, after four and a half years of cooking on board and making the fire: one day, she would like a rent to pay, football on the television. Chris, the father, would not go back to settled life: “They didn’t want us in England, or in Spain.” And the future makes no sense: “Every time this cart goes on the road, every time we hitch up the horses, it could be our last day.” A lorry has already hit them from behind, and the wagon ended up in the ditch. They cover up to 40 kilometres a day, in the rain. What little money they earn goes on food, then on the horses.
The family worries less about lorries than about the small roads, “too dangerous”: on the main roads there is “room to manoeuvre”.Ballinasloe is three days away by cart, one of the largest markets in Europe, where the travellers come to sell their horses. In the 19th century, up to 4,000 horses, 30,000 head of cattle and 100,000 sheep were sold there, and it was there that Marengo, Napoleon’s horse at Waterloo, was bought. In the past, nomads came to find a horse for their wagon. Most are settled today, but they come back for a weekend, bring out their finest carts, ride nervous horses bareback, so as to reconnect with tradition. Sean has come to sell hens, five euros each when they are worth ten. He haggles, lets two hens go for nine euros, wants to resell the one a customer has already paid for. A boy would like to be given one, and offers to find customers in exchange. Everywhere in Europe, a reputation precedes the nomads; in Ireland, they are given a roof to take them off the road, and the countryside has been emptied of its wagons and caravans.
Of these horses ridden without a saddle, one is said to be “the fastest in the country”.
For the boy who would like to be given a hen, the deal is quickly settled: “It’s one euro to touch it.”In Dublin, a dozen families have taken over a patch of waste ground, wedged between a luxury hotel and the airport. Tom has three caravans there: one for cooking and the daytime, one for sleeping when the stove works, one for travelling in summer; when they move on, they keep only one. They have been here for a year and will be evicted at the end of the month, with nowhere to go. In the evening, Jerry, the uncle who has settled, comes to share the rabbit soup by the fire, and they talk about the flat the State is offering them. “For me, being in a flat is like being locked up behind bars”, says Rosemary. In the morning, Tom scours the city’s neighbourhoods for scrap metal, about 120 kilometres a day, without a map: “The map is in my head.” Copper has reached five euros a kilo. People here don’t really like them: “They think that when we park, we’re going to rob them.” At the camp, a little girl doesn’t want a house: “it looks like a prison”. At night, the rabbit hunt, on a golf course, ends with the police.
The scrap that Tom cannot resell at the market is recycled by weight at the tip; after four hours on his rounds, it is already full.
In the skips, Tom insists, “you find everything. Gold”, often, and money, “lots of money”.
In a house, she says, “you’re stuck inside”; and settled people, for their part, “think we’re dirty”.“Yes, I believe in it. Love is everywhere. You can find your soulmate at every crossroads.”Kevin