Helen Hutchinson is a poet with a lifetime of activism and community building – and a founding member of Pavee Point, a groundbreaking group set up in 1985 which used a collective community development approach to fight for Traveller & Roma human rights.
She’s one of Skein Press’ ‘Play It Forward’ Fellows in 2023, and her first poetry collection, ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads’, was published in June 2024.
And she’s guest editor of the Poetry Ireland Review pamphlet Trumpet (issue 13), which was launched as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival last year.
It was a cultural genocide to a Travelling family
taken away from our people,
breaking up the community.
Our culture taken away from us,
our traditions and our ways
brought up in a country
where Travellers never had a say.
With thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support.
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Previous episodes: Wander Season 4 // Season 3
Helen Hutchinson Transcript:
Bairbre Flood: Hi and welcome back to this new season of Wander. Hope you’re all keeping well.
A massive thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland who’ve funded this again, and thanks to everyone who got in touch with me since the last season, and who’ve shared episodes and given their feedback – it’s much appreciated, thank you.
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This year we’ve got a fantastic lineup – and for the first time including Traveller poets. For those outside of Ireland, Travellers are the indigenous people of Ireland. They are a distinct ethnic minority with their own culture, language and traditions. In the 1960’s the Irish government brought in a series of laws that tried to destroy their way of life.
My guest today, Helen Hutchinson, was one of the first families to experience this state policy and we talk about this in depth, and how it affects people today.
She’s an incredible woman, with a lifetime of activism and community building.
Helen is a founding member of Pavee Point, a groundbreaking group set up in 1985 which used a collective community development approach to fight for Traveller & Roma human rights.
Helen is also a prolific poet – She’s one of Skein Press’ ‘Play It Forward’ Fellows in 2023, and her first poetry collection, ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads’, was published in June 2024.
And she’s guest editor of the Poetry Ireland Review pamphlet Trumpet, which was launched as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival last year.
Helen starts off by describing what her early years were like, before the forced settlement, when they still lived on the road.
This is Helen Hutchinson.
MUSIC
Helen Hutchinson: The memories of the road for me would be the campfire, would be the kettle boiling, would be Mammy with a skillet pot, baking bread. And you look up at sometimes different occasions when a few Travellers would pull in and Mammy going up on the road and looking up to see how many was there because everybody would be called for a dinner.
And each Traveller on the road would help each other at different times with meals.
I remember my brother Michael, would be about 12 years old, 13 maybe. Mammy would be going out begging because at that time you literally didn’t have anything. And Michael would be the main one looking after us.
I can remember him feeding us goodie – bread and milk. And then we’d go out into the little wood and we’d have a little cobbie house there. There’s only stones and cans and boxes, but to us it meant a world. It was our little space.
And the women, along with the men, out thinning beet, picking potatoes, sending up to Dublin for what they used to call stock.
And that would be slides, hair clips. Soap brushes, hair brushes, all of that from a little basket. And then they’ll go out hawking the soap. When Mammy would be going begging, she’d always bring that little basket of stuff. And if people didn’t have anything to give her, she’d actually swap some stuff. There were times when we did go out with her, trotting alongside of her, and we’d have a gallon – still have it – a gallon for milk. And when we got to their doors with the houses, and the women were nice and they’d be looking at us and she would saying to them: yeah, geigger for a grade that means beggar for a bit of money, or geiger there for a supper outter – that means milk. And, when it was given to her, then we’d always get that little bit from them as well.
Coming back to the camp, and sometimes in the winter it would be dark on our way home and we’d have the lanterns on the pony and the cart. They’d show us the light. There wasn’t many cars on the road I remember.
In the distance then you’d see the fire and you knew that Michael would be there because when we used to go out with Mammy, he’d spend the day there. Maybe out through the land picking timber. So he’d have the fire lit and having water boiled and everything for Mammy when she came home.
So it was very much family orientated. We were very much family orientated. But then in 1967 anyway, through the law and through the social workers at the time, and the council, we were forced to settle down, and that meant going up off the roads. It was a dreadful place to live to be honest with you.
It was a half mile, maybe three quarters of a mile up a lane. It’s called Coolnamona and there wasn’t a neighbour in sight and you’re left there to dwell on your own.
Our first school experiences was from there. We had to go to school because that threat was held over our father and mothers: if you don’t go to school, your children will be taken into care.
When we went to school, we were all brought up to the front of the class beside the teacher’s desk. I’ll never forget it, and we were introduced to the settled children. Those are the Hutchinsons. They used to be tinkers off the side of the road but they have a house now, so they’re not tinkers anymore.
Helen Hutchinson: And that was our first shock of realizing we were different without even us knowing that we were different from the settled community. And then from there on it gave a kind of a bit of contempt within the settle children because they didn’t look at us then for a fair while as anything other than these dirty tinkerers.
And I remember the teachers looking at our hands and at our hair and at our feet and to know if we were cleaned and. On the school yard, then we would be bullied a lot. Tinkerers, knackers, tinkerers, you’re dirty. Nobody would hold your hand, nobody wanted to play with you. You felt very hurt.
So we’d huddle in our own little group as a family again, and it was like us against them instead of being in unity with them. As time went by though it did soften. But not all the children. There was still some that remained adamant, proper racist children. It was coming from the home and that first introduction I always blamed from the school.
It was oppression, but we didn’t know what to call it and we used to call it hate at a slight because of who we were, Hutchinsons, so we felt rejected.
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Helen Hutchinson: This is one poem that I really like ’cause I’m tried to hit back at the system, in any way I can.
This is called ‘A Starry Flag’.
MUSIC
Wrap the starry flag around me for I am Irish.
Two for my people’s namesake are part of history.
There’s McCarthy’s and McDonoughs. Quinn and Casey’s too as Seia, jewel and darling, don’t ignore us.
Now, will you? Joyces of Connemara, a big part of our clan.
Proud to be Travellers. To be part of this land.
The horse and the wagons may be gone, but there again,
it takes more than the romantic notion to be a traveling man.
All our trades are gone now.
They died at death so hard,
just like a bullet from a gun,
never to be revived.
Now dependent on the dole to live from week to week
and independent people that the system made so weak,
Gone but not forgotten are the times of long ago,
but you don’t have to be on the road to be a Traveller.
A proud man of proud people.
Some of our history saved for my children
and their children are traditions we will hold.
There’s enough of our history dead.
I miss the camps and us singing round of fire.
But I remember all the rebel songs handed down to us
by Cant and the Gammon is our language now,
though mostly gone.
The system did a job on us, banned us from traveling and moving on.
It is a caring country, a land we call home
wrap the starry flag around me for I am Irish too.
MUSIC
Helen Hutchinson: As the first traveling family I’d say, or maybe one of the first anyway, to be housed. They really did our best to change our mindset and make us conform into the system, into their way.
When I became old enough, then my brother was in Dublin, I went up to Dublin and I started being involved with a group, the DTEDG, which is now known as Pavee Point.
And it is from there that I even before that I was lost ’cause I was saying. Traveller, settled person, Traveller, settled person. You go into the village, you are a settled person, you come back up that lane, you were a Traveller and very confusing. But in Dublin, when I went on a journey with that group of people, all Travellers, 24 of us. And we had good mentors – people that would prompt us into what way we were thinking and why we were thinking the way we were thinking and generally looking at Irish society. Where we stood and we were on the verge of Irish society and what could we do about it? And realizing that we didn’t have a voice.
And then on the scene was Nan Joyce and Chrissy Ward and Mick McDonald (Lord have mercy on him) and Nell and there was us, and we started to kind of form groups with each other and talk to each other and found strength. And unity started to grow within our community.
Helen Hutchinson: But it was through the DTEDG, that I actually found myself as a Traveller again.
When I went to Dublin and back into, not a wagon, but back into a trailer and to live with just the basic things and a candle in the night.
And in a way though, it made me a feeling of belong. I found that. I was comfortable with that. It’s like it’s something that is running your blood and that you know automatically that this is who you are, this is where you should be, and you look back and you say, how dare they take us and put us up in houses?
What harm were we doing on the roads?
Travellers are crying out for halting sites.And when the government build those places, they don’t ever think of the extended family, that those children will grow up and get married, and then you’ll have the extended family. And with Travellers when you usually stay with your father and your mother, and your sisters and your brothers as a unit, an extended unit and the system is geared to break up that unit, tear us all apart and in time, we’ll just completely and utterly be gone and be swept into the system.
Just molded in so tight that we lose who we are and our heritage and everything that we have and that we hold dear.
Bairbre Flood: Do you feel a similarity with what they did with the Aboriginal tribes in Australia and Native Americans and what they’re doing with the Western Sahara people now – do you see a similar kind of mechanism?
Helen Hutchinson: I do, yes, I do. Sure. They ruined the poor Aborigines with drink.
They gave them drink, they did the same to the Indians. They gave them smallpox and blankets and whiskey again and destroyed them and gave them reservations. And now they called, they call themselves Americans. No, it’s the Indians that are the proper American people and the Aborigines, the proper Australian people.
And I believe the Travellers, the proper Irish people. When you’re outnumbered to the extent that you’re only 1% of the Irish population, then you are hammered and you’re someone to be picked on. While other bigger issues may be diverted and zoom in on you as a community and you’re highlighted as a problem people, instead of people with problems.
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Bairbre Flood: Do they teach anything in schools yet about Traveller culture? Is that changed at all?
Helen Hutchinson: No, it hasn’t changed. Maybe in the schools around Dublin or the cities. Maybe once in a while to bring in a Traveller. To do a talk with the children in general classrooms. But so far as I know, there isn’t anything in the mainstream education – which there should be – in the curriculum to teach them about the Travelling community as an ethnic group when they’re small so they come up with an open mind and to be looking at us in a different light. But it’s not.
What the threat is, I don’t know, but it is a fact. No, there isn’t. There isn’t any, as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t. And I think it’s a long way off before that happens.
Bairbre Flood: Yeah. How was it editing The Trumpet? The Poetry Ireland magazine recently?
Helen Hutchinson: Oh, that was brilliant because that’s something I never actually got into. And it is wonderful to have been a part of that.
Bairbre Flood: Did you have a glossary of the gammon terms?
Helen Hutchinson: Yes. Myself and Mervyn Ennis, we did a glossary.
Cause Mervyn Ennis is a social worker and we go back about 50 years because my uncle Jimmy was the first man to get to know Mervyn. Mervyn was only a child I. And influenced Mervyn as to look at Travellers as then he grew up, he went in and he became a social worker. And many’s a battle he fought for Travellers’ rights, even articulating a case in Strasburg and winning in the human rights court. But Mervin knows as much as us from being with us, about our language. There, there’s words that I wouldn’t know, and I’d be looking at Mervyn. Mervyn would have those words, and there’s words then that he wouldn’t know that I would have those words.
And if we don’t save our language we’re losing a lot because your language is everything. And there’s still a lot of it out there. And still a lot of it to be collected. Mick McDonnagh had done a lot, he’d done a lot of mega work on it (Lord have mercy on him) he was a great man and collected a lot. And other people, a lot of Travellers, other Travellers now will be well up with it.
Like Martin Ward, Mags Casey and Martin Collins and, lot of people around the country now. And Sindy Joyce, she would be in Limerick and she works in the university there. Yeah, there’s a big change on, within Travellers, a big shift now for to save everything anyway, and they’re doing it in a new way.
Not so many going to meetings and trying to explain yourself, but through the arts, through drama, through acting, through plays, through singing, through music, through poetry, and we are getting attention. People are starting to listen because maybe it’s something they can relate to.
Helen Hutchinson: While we were getting an education within the settled community about their way the organizations that are now formed and are out there giving the education to Travellers about our own history.
And it’s very important and thanks be to God they’re there. Great activists and great movements going on and great shift going on. We’re getting stronger by the year now, and we’re getting more assertive, and we’re actually saying, no, no more. And this Ethnicity Bill is it worth the paper it’s written on or what rights come with it?
Travellers should still to this day have a right to roam and that’s what I mean about this Ethnicity Bill. What’s on it? Does that give if they’re giving us our full rights, that should be one of them. And we wouldn’t be looking for to roam. It’d be for more halting sites in the line of transit sites where they could just go from site to site during the summers or where the children are off in school. Instead of just getting a caravan and moving out onto the road and being ran when they consider themselves being out on a holiday for old time’s sake and reminiscent about the roads.
They’re not allowed to do that.
The system is well aware of what they’re doing to us. They’re well aware that they are suppressing us and trying their best to knock the Traveller ways out of us.
MUSIC
Alone and forsaken in the corner of a bog.
It’s what the council gave us.
This, I swear to God.
A few cows and sheep and a farmer now and then looking to their needs.
It was a cultural genocide to a Travelling family
taken away from our people,
breaking up the community.
Our culture taken away from us,
our traditions and our ways
brought up in a country
where Travellers never had a say.
We went to school and learned the rules of the settled way of life.
Nothing about who we were
as we struggled and we strived.
Nobody cared who we were,
not given a chance.
A rigged system to rid Ireland of Traveller families.
We integrated, all right? We all went around like strays.
MUSIC
Helen Hutchinson: In a way. I feel now that we had to submit our ways in order to be a part of their ways.
Then through the suicides, people, their hearts went out to us. Because they never realized what a lonely place we lived and what really happened to us as a family. And in the second one that was really a heartbreaker.
Cause my brother Jack, he was a gentle soul and he’d go around and he’d go in and have an ‘aul drink and he never harmed or hurt anyone. A big believer in God and loved his dogs. He’d greyhounds and he loved him and the shock of it, I found Jack with my father and mother, and that will never leave my mind.
And we were very close ’cause he was a year older than me and we used to talk a lot. But poor Jack was very depressed and he was in and out of mental hospitals. And he’d come out the odd time ok, but most of the time he came out worse than better because he’d be stooped to the ground with tablets.
And that’s how hard our life was. And I know that Jack in particular suffered depression because Jack wasn’t into sports or anything. So therefore Jack wouldn’t be involved with the boys of Clogh Jordan or going and have a drink with him when they were served. And Jack was a loner and his attachment to Daddy and Mammy, his love for his father and mother was unreal.
Because not long before he died and we didn’t click anything, he said to my uncle Jimmy, he said, Jimmy, if Mammy and Daddy are gone, you know I won’t be able to live. I wouldn’t live without him. I wouldn’t be able to live without my Daddy and Mammy.
And Jimmy said, of course you will Jack have brothers and sisters. There’s years in your father and mother yet. But a couple months after that Jack died. That got into him.
Helen Hutchinson: And, for Paddy as well, because when Paddy was alive, they used to go on bikes everywhere or if they didn’t have two bikes, Paddy would carry him on the handlebars and then the carrier of the other bike. So they were very close. Poor Paddy was a great hurler, great point scorer as the call would call him, but he withdrew because he got a TB, which was a big taboo at the time.
He was on medication for years, but he actually came out all right for it. But with him as well he withdrew and everything and he would be in his room. Not a heavy drinker, but isolation. And just one morning we woke up and we found Paddy that committed suicide just down the road from down a little bit from us.
Helen Hutchinson: The suicides they really you’d carry it with you for life. The pain, the hurt, the scars that people can’t see. You’d never get too deep in your soul to how painful it is for people to go through that, whether it be Travellers or settle people. And there’s an awful lot going on within the settled community too, an awful lot of lives lost.
Here in Nenagh, I think there’s two or three last week. Yeah. And, and all young people, it’s, and they’re suppressed as well because they’re living in poor housing estate. And because of that, they’re looked down upon. And I remember when I was in Dublin, it was much the same situation.
Michael and other Travellers were on this particular field, and the council started building council houses and brought the inner city people out to the council houses. And then the inner city people looked at the Travellers with contempt and there was protests and marches for to move us on until we got together and asked for a residents meeting, committee meetings and all that.
And then it started to come. In Tallaght, in Brookfield, where we had the people from Brookfield coming over to a halting site that we actually got built and where we had this big train carriage, and there’d be a pool table and a telly in it. And where would be integration going on in cards and pool, and they started to integrate.
And that way there was an awful lot of barriers broken down. And I believe if that was to happen in a wider range even now, it would break down more barriers. But it isn’t, instead of that I feel the sense that it is more divided now than ever it was in the eighties, is more divided.
With the help of the young Travellers that’s coming up now, though I hope that it’ll make a change and have an impact through the drama, through the acting, through the songs, and in everything they’re doing. Wonderful stuff, out there that it will reach a point where we can reach out without two other people and, expose ourselves in the sense to them that we are just human beings. Okay? We have different ways of life, but as human beings, we’re the same. We hurt, we bleed, but we live, and you have to live and live side by side in peace with no animosity towards each other.
If it weren’t for poor John O’Connell say (Lord have mercy on him) and Ronnie. Activists and allies like him and who worked with us, not for us. With us all the way. There were allies: Mervyn Ennis, John O’Connell, Stacey Quigley, Ronnie Faye, and a thousand more.
And people there that used to encourage us and walk us forward and be behind us. And there’s still, to this day, a lot of people out there doing the same thing. And I’m very thankful to them.
It’s settled people with positions of community workers that are needed that can learn of the Travellers’ ways and have interaction with them and bring the young people around them in a group just like John Connell did with us and educate each other.
Because people say, oh, didn’t they educate you? No, they didn’t. They didn’t know anything about us. It was us 24 in a group learning from each other and kicking off from there. And that needs to happen more. But we need our allies and outreach more to the settled community. But we need the settled community too, to reach out to us.
Bairbre Flood: Was there anything, Helen, I didn’t ask you about? Was there anything we didn’t cover?
Helen Hutchinson: Yeah I’d like to see more centers and I’d like to see more spaces made available to young Travellers. You have a lot of places, you have a lot of activities going on in Dublin and Limerick and in Galway and Cork, the big cities.
But when it comes to their towns where a lot of young Travellers are, there is nothing going on for them. There’s not even a youth club, there’s nothing there. I would like to emphasize that, and that would be the start of getting the Travellers involved and from there, taking it onto leadership within their community like we did.
I’d like to see more of that going on, but I’d like to see it local based and for like little umbrella organizations, if say one big organization, but the little branches. And that would be support there for them.
Let them know that they have a proud heritage and that they come from a proud people and that they shouldn’t hang their heads for anybody.
Hold your head up ’cause nobody has a right to treat another human being as different or as lower class than name. We are all equal in the eyes of God. And it’s just sad to think that in this day and age that we’re still fighting.
MUSIC
Bairbre Flood: A massive thanks to Helen Hutchinson for sharing her poetry and her life experiences with us. And for the huge amount of work she’s done over the years for Traveller rights.
I’ll put a link to Pavee Point in the show notes and to the Poetry Ireland pamphlet, Trumpet – which Helen edited – and a link to her poetry collection, ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads.’
Also if you know of any Traveller or Roma poets please let them know about an open call I’ve put for poetry. This is also open to poets with lived experience of forced exile or seeking refuge.
It’s a paid opportunity and the submissions are open until the end of April – all the details are up on the website.
Please do pass on to anyone you think might be interested.
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Next week, I’m talking to Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet –
TRAILER CLIP
Noor Hindi: While, while, while, the news keeps screaming, the headlines chew at our eyes.
A bald eagle burdens its wings with suitcases, then drops them in another land.
MUSIC
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for the funding support, and thank you for listening.
From me, Bairbre Flood, bye for now.
