Carolyn Leckie: Prejudice around Gypsy/Travellers must come to an end

It was International Roma Day on 8 April – and I was privileged to meet him and his sister, Roseanna, to mark it.

The experiment involved creating 60 feet by 18 feet huts, each divided into four “dwellings” without electricity or sanitation, to test if Gyspy/Travellers could be assimilated into “civilised” mainstream life. Those families who were deemed worthy of public utilities were moved out of the camp into the poorest quality council housing, even though it was alien to their culture and way of life. Those who remained behind at Bobbin Mill ended up spreading out into whatever caravans they could source as their families grew larger.

Electricity only came to the residents of the site five or six years ago. Not long before that, the original damp, dilapidated, asbestos-filled huts were replaced by second-hand chalets cast off by a holiday company to the Perth and Kinross Council at a knockdown price. Each adult resident is charged £70 a week to live in them.

Shamus was born into one of the old huts, reminiscent of blocks in a concentration camp, with his brothers and sisters all crammed into a single room. But he now doggedly lives in a small caravan on the site. In his case, the council’s experiment, which began to try and assimilate him before he was born, failed miserably.

Shamus is proud of being a Gypsy Traveller and campaigns to preserve his cultural rights. He and his sister Roseanna were central to Gypsy/Traveller people achieving recognition as a minority ethnic group.

Even an activity which is integral to his culture – travelling – is rare to him because of lack of facilities and restrictive legislation. “It was more relaxed in the 1970s, when people could stop at traditional sites. Or they could park up in laybys, which is now prohibited. Now no more than two or three vehicles are allowed to stop together – and breaking these rules can risk a £25,000 fine.” Simply lighting up a campfire, a traditional focal point for Gypsy Traveller families since time immemorial, is prohibited across most of the countryside.

Travelling also costs money, something that’s in short supply within the Gypsy/Traveller community, where unemployment rates are 90 per cent.

Shamus is a graduate of linguistics with a post graduate qualification in translating, and a talented artist. But he is forced to rely on a bit of gardening work and other odd jobs to get by. Over the years, he’s sent away 4,000 applications for permanent employment– and only had two interviews.

He has a vast reservoir of knowledge about grammar and the connections between Roma, Gaelic, Scots and his own ethnic tongue, Cant. Yet he finds it hard to get translation work – partly because Bobbin Mill still has no functioning broadband.

Shamus says that Gypsy/Travellers have been marginalised to such an extent that they no longer meet each other. An articulate, handsome and intelligent man, he says he’s “unmarriageable” because of prejudice.

This is not a figment of his imagination. A recent Scottish Social Attitudes survey found that nine per cent of respondents would not be happy if a close relative married or formed a long term relationship with someone black or Asian. This is bad enough, but it shoots up to 67 per cent when people are asked the same question about Gypsy/Travellers.

Shamus estimates that there are up to 60,000 Gypsy/Travellers living in Scotland – but 90 per cent are now in mainstream housing. Many hide their backgrounds for fear of discrimination and persecution. Some don’t even know that they come from Gypsy/Travellers.

In these days of mass interest in genealogy and popular programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? children sit in Scottish classrooms with no idea of their origins, because at some point their families decided the discrimination was too much.

Shamus thinks that must have exerted enormous psychological strain. If he hid his identity, he would “feel like an empty vessel.”

Even the Scottish Parliament’s Equal Opportunities Committee, which I sat on when it published one report on Gypsy/Travellers, is “frustrated” that “very little has been achieved to improve the lives of Gypsy/Travellers”.

Roseanna, a qualified – but unemployed – teacher of Gaelic says, “There have been umpteen inquiries. They’re more about showing they’re doing something rather than actually doing anything.”

Life expectancy for the community is estimated by Shamus and Roseanna at between 47 and 52 years for men and 55 for women, which is significantly lower than that of the poorest areas in Glasgow.

Roseanna can recite a thousand tales of being refused access to health care and public services, and of misdiagnoses, as people are treated as if their symptoms are “all in their head” or “self-inflicted” because they live in a caravan. The Equal Opportunities Committee took evidence from many people who are prepared to travel hundreds of miles to see a health professional they can trust.

Basic public services that most of us take for granted are only obtained through decades of struggle. Shamus had to mount a campaign to get his mail delivered to his caravan.

For most of their lives, Shamus and Roseanna have been proud campaigners for their ethnic and cultural rights. Yet modest ambitions for facilities such as a Gypsy/Traveller cultural centre have failed to come to fruition. Meanwhile, legal recognition of their status as an ethnic minority doesn’t stop those who should know better questioning that status.

The scale of discrimination, the shocking health outcomes, the indefensible employment barriers, the children forced to keep their identities secret – all of this is common to Gypsy/Travellers across the world.

In these post-referendum days, a lot of us in Scotland like to see ourselves as enlightened, progressive and ahead of the curve. So it’s time we put some oomph behind the mountains of reports that have been produced on the situation of Gypsy/Travellers, to make sure equality and human rights are delivered in practice, and not just in words.

Most of all, we need to tear down the barriers that prevent all of those from Gypsy/Traveller backgrounds feeling free to be themselves, and living their lives as they choose, with access to the same resources that everyone else expects as a right.