Poet and Traveller Helen Hutchinson introduces this year's Traveller Pride Week - this annual event celebrates Traveller culture and identity and includes 40 free events across 22 counties.
Reading my poems as a Traveller during Traveller Pride Week is an honour for me. Traveller Pride Week is an annual two-week initiative celebrating and showcasing our way of life and our culture, which I believe makes an important contribution to promoting us as Irish people. The events taking place around the country, including both local and national events, are designed to create a greater understanding of us Travellers within Irish society.
We will celebrate across the country the contributions that Travellers have made to our own community and in wider society. We as Travellers have a long-shared history, culture, values and beliefs as well as our own language. Our traditions are recognisable, different and distinct and we celebrate what distinguishes us from the settled community; while at the same time we share our music, our actors and our activities which play a major part in highlighting our plight as one of the most oppressed ethnic minority groups in Ireland.
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Watch, via RTÉ News: Traveller Pride Week 2023 is launched in Dublin
With collective residence, we campaigned for our community to be recognised as an ethnic group in our own right – which was won in 2017. Out of this action and other actions, groups of Travellers from across the country organised and joined the campaign for Traveller-rights, along with our allies from the settled community.
It is so important for us Travellers to take pride in ourselves, to give thanks to those who inspired us and honour their legacy by keeping our history alive and passing it down to others.
As a community, over time, we have developed a strong voice for our own people and issues that affect us. Discrimination and racism towards Travellers still exist today, but as a community, we are resilient and we will continue to fight to be listened to, and to be part of this Irish nation. We have wonderful spokespeople from all over the country who are doing their upmost to educate and challenge Irish society and the way Travellers are valued and treated.
Whether you are a Traveller or settled person let's see what we can learn from each other as different people with a shared goal to respect each other as humans, and as fellow Irish people. In celebrating our culture, our values and our pride in who we are through song, acting, poetry and storytelling, we leave an open door where anybody can join us.
'A Travellers Ireland'#TravellerPrideWeek @PaveePoint @itmtrav #TravellerPrideWeek2023
— RTÉ Archives (@RTEArchives) July 3, 2023
WATCH: RTÉ News reports #OnThisDay in 2005 https://t.co/QIy94cho0w
Through our positive contribution, our singers, our poets, our storytellers and great actors we are doing our very best to share and bring both communities together to create a better understanding. Yes, our lifestyles may be different, but we share so much as Irish people and that has to be respected.
Through Traveller Pride Week events, we love and welcome the fact that we can sit down and entertain and give a little of ourselves – if only for a week or two, all over Ireland. It is our hope through these positive exchanges, we might also change some of the stereotypes and challenge some of the racism that exists.
It is so important for us Travellers to take pride in ourselves, to give thanks to those who inspired us and honour their legacy by keeping our history alive and passing it down to others.
The amazing Kitty Cassidy - 83 years of age and still singing. #TravellerPrideWeek2023 pic.twitter.com/8gnRdJOluC
— Chris O'Dwyer (@ChrisODwyer93) July 3, 2023
Most of us now are in houses or in halting sites brought on by assimilation, so now, more than ever, it's very important to have our own people involved in preserving our culture.
Of course, it is great that we ourselves can and will celebrate our own life and its meaning in a very significant way this Traveller Pride Week, and it is an honour for me as a Traveller to contribute to these events.
Find out more about this year's Traveller Pride Week programme here.
