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Nation-Building, Social Closure and Anti-Traveller Racism in Ireland

This paper examines relations between `tinkers', or `Travellers', and settled society in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. It argues that the racialisation and defamation of Travellers then reached new heights with the development of a rural fundamentalist nationalism which fused with Social Darwinism and caused Travellers to be treated as social anachronisms in an increasingly settled and sanitised society. This in turn meant that Travellers were located outside the moral and political structures of the Irish state and placed at the `hostile' end of a continuum running from tradition to modernity. As a result of renewed modernisation through industrialisation in the 1970s through to the 1990s, new strategies of social closure have emerged which are causing Travellers to be located at the outer edges of Irish society. The paper finally suggests that the constant structuring and restructuring of economy and space in Ireland have fostered `fortress' mentalities here. This is aggravating divisions, both at national and local level, between subaltern Travellers and hegemonic sectors in Irish society.