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Notes -
The Traveller Question
In rural England, two girls are raped by a group of 13 and 14 year old boys. Eventually arrested and charged, a judge sentences them to community service, because he wants to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily”. An outrage ensues, even the Prime Minister calls the sentence a disgrace. Little reported on: these youths were neither migrants nor the traditional native underclass of Albion. They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.
A year or two after I first moved to London, I witnessed a commotion outside Harrods. A large group of white teenagers was arguing with the store’s security. White teenagers are not particularly rare in London, but an entire group that is white and mostly blonde and blue eyed is. They were also dressed in an unusual way, the boys in an exaggerated version of the ‘Deano’ style of the time with some designer accoutrements - Prada caps, Gucci cross body bags; the girls in tight dresses or shorts and push-up bras, full faces of heavy makeup, much costume jewelry. Dressing like this is a working class English pastime, but in most English towns and cities it’s the preserve of college aged adults. These were children, maybe 12, 13, 14. Of interest, too, was that many were couples - 13 year old girls and boys holding hands, that kind of thing. Rare in secular society. There was no parental supervision that I could see, either. These gatherings happen regularly outside Harrods; occasionally someone is stabbed (the last time this happened in that exact location was a few weeks ago).
They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies, a highly clannish, poor and violent population who live itinerant lives across the British Isles, bane of farmers and publicans, fond of suing anyone who crosses them under anti-discrimination laws they lobbied for (in both the Irish republic and United Kingdom) that grant them special status as an ethnic minority. In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.
But here’s the unusual thing about Irish Travelers: they’re Irish. Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population. Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge. What genetic studies have been done claim to show difference only in terms of higher levels of inbreeding over the fewer than 12 generations for which they’ve existed (discrediting earlier theories that they had some ancient or Romani ancestry, which they do not).
The Irish Travellers are younger as a people than the Amish, for example. They are younger, depending on how you look at things, than the Ultra Orthodox Jews, who arguably first emerged at a similar or earlier time in the mid-18th century. HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller. They also have a very interesting culture. Despite the girls dressing very immodestly, they place a very high emphasis on both sexual purity and very early marriage, for example, sometimes as early as 14-16, for both boys and girls. They have a total fertility rate of somewhere around 3, higher than even many fecund minority groups and perhaps double the (rest of the) native population.
Beyond the occasional London gathering (which at times involves these people racing their horse-drawn buggies - chariots really - through the city) Irish travelers mainly live in the country, where they are widely hated by rural residents for (perceived or real) squatting on their land, theft of property and livestock, domestic burglary, petty crime, and welfare abuse. One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths, and who then decided to wait for them, lights off, at the top of his staircase with a shotgun. He killed one, with the judge ruling that this was clearly a trap rather than self defense (he had bragged about it, which was unfortunate) and initially went to jail for life before being reduced to 3 years after a public outcry. There was another famous case recently in which a local cop was brutally killed by some Travellers driving away from a crime scene, dragged behind a car for a mile which killed him, they didn’t stop; this resulted in another major outcry, which led to sentences for cop killers being increased. Beyond this, the English state is, as it is in so many cases, broadly incapable of doing anything, forced assimilation is impossible even for settled populations, let alone itinerant ones.
But there is a large slice of the English countryside where the greatest ire is reserved today not for migrants or any other foreign population, but for these Irish Travelers. There is even a (flawed) case sometimes made that much historic prejudice against Irish migrants was more about these people than the rest of the Irish (although, as mentioned, this is wrong at least until very recently). Over time, their birth rates mean they will be an ever larger proportion of the population.
A much stranger episode in Engligh civil law history also involving gypsies has to be Attorney-General v Corke [1933] Ch 89. The case itself doesn't mention whether the "nomadic caravan dwellers" were Irish travellers or Romani but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that a landowner of a brick field near a town allowed them to camp on it for a while. The expected happened and they dumped shit and caused general mayhem in the surrounds outside the landowner's field. The locals were, as you can expect, not amused. Knowing that suing the "nomadic caravan dwellers" was pointless the local authority decided to go after the landowner instead.
They won in court. But the twist was that it wasn't for nuisance or some other everyday tort like that. Instead the judge ruled that this was a situation which came under Rylands v Fletcher. This is a little known rule of English law which holds that:
Normally this tort applies to things escaping due to unnatural use of land, so stuff like fire, water, gas or other dangerous substances (the original case was one relating to a water reservoir breaking and flooding a neighbour's mine) leaking out and carries strict liability, so there's no easy defense for the landowner. Mr. Justice Bennett, in his infinite wisdom, decided though that inviting gypsies to live on your field constituted an unnatural use of land likely to cause mischief if they escaped, and the landowner was accordingly held liable. Now that's something you don't get to see every day!
Of course there's no way such a claim would succeed in the same terms today, this is a bygone relic from an era where English judges were still Based.
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