Celebrating Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month

This month, June 2009, is being marked in Britain as History Month for the Gypsy, Roma and Travelling communities to remind people both within and outside these communities of their real and lasting role played in history and culture.

In the wake of the gains made by the BNP in England, by the Jobbik anti-Roma party in Hungary, and by other extreme parties elsewhere in the June 2009 European Parliamentary elections let us remind ourselves how these communities have been victimised and marginalised in the past. The attempts by the Nazis to wipe out the Roma are only recent history. Even more recent was the killing of 15 year-old Traveller Johnny Delaney in Ellesmere Port in May 2003, which is not widely known about. Read the BBC report of the trial of Johnny's killers; the police investigation treated this as a racist crime but the judge in the case decided otherwise.

The big event in the Travelling community this month is of course the Appleby Fair in Cumbria, but the website of the Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month GRTHM shows other events being organised all round Britain. The GRT Achievement Service in Leeds has an online shop with a new DVD 'The First Traveller' for sale with songs, stories and music from such Travellers as Sheila Stewart MBE. The GRTHM has also produced a small collection of songs in the downloadable Romano Drom Songbook.

Here is a great cultural tradition to celebrate, and one which should be valued for its vitality and vigour.

Nicodemus
8 June 2009

Magdalene Laundries: Bizarre Opening

It is a bit late in the day to catch up with the film 'Magdalene Laundries', but as it has just been broadcast on Channel 4 on 30 November it has been my first sighting of it. It is a powerful film which portrays the sheer awfulness of treatment issued to 'errant' women in Catholic Ireland in the 1960's - although such treatment isn't confined to Ireland, or to Catholics, nor to the (not so distant) past. Young women and girls who had illegitimate children, or who were thought to be morally at risk were sent to institutions run by nuns - portrayed in the film as cruel and sadistic, but who were probably in reality as much victims of a harsh moral climate as the inmates themselves.

The film began badly; there is a wedding scene with Irish music playing but a sinister note is introduced by a priest singing the song 'The Well Below the Valley' which tells of a girl who has had illegitimate children and will have to pay penance in purgatory for her sins. The scenes then show a girl being raped by her cousin while the wedding celebrations merrily continue.

BUT - and this reveals huge difficulties. The song 'The Well Below the Valley' had a reputation as an unlucky song as the full version describes incest and infanticide; by the 1960's hardly anybody in Ireland sang it except a few among the travelling community. No priest would have sung it. It would never, ever, have been sung at a wedding. ( I shall pass over the sheer anachronism of the highly decorated bodhran the priest is seen to be playing.)

The song was popularised in the 1970's by the Irish folk band Planxty who had learned it from the recording of an Irish Traveller, John Reilly, who had died from malnutrition in 1969. But its theme ensured that it is still seen as a 'difficult' song and other recordings of the song are still relatively rare.

Above all it isn't a song for a social occasion and it is this inability to understand cultural contexts that grates so much that for me it undermines the truth of the rest of the film.