Displaced in Mullingar:The electric light has wiped out all the Travellers' ghosts, but not their gift of story telling, writes Michael Harding

In the autumn of 1994 I spent two months on a barge near Tullamore. At the time I was working with the Tullamore Travellers' Movement, and spent most of the days in trailers, listening to Travellers talking about poverty, babies, and ghosts.

The Travellers I met lived on an unofficial halting site, with no running water. We would pass the time looking out the windows and telling stories.

For them, story telling was liberating in the sense that it freed them from the mundane. It was crippling, because they were always victims in their own narrative.

I met a beautiful woman called Julia. She was small, with lines of suffering in her weather-beaten face. She had hair as black as ravens' feathers, though she was then more than 70.

She told me she got into a bit of bother in Mullingar one time, and ended up in Mountjoy. Apparently she was involved in an altercation with another Traveller woman. The pair of them exchanged insults on the street. Julia put her blanket on the ground, placed her baby on it, and then took a turnip from a shop stall and flung it at her opponent. The opponent fled.

A garda arrived. And the owner of the shop came to the fore, whinging about the loss of the turnip. Julia was so frustrated that she was compelled to take another turnip from the stall, and this time flung it through the plate-glass window of the shop. That's how she ended up in prison.

Another Traveller woman once told me of the miscarriage her daughter endured in the bathroom of her terraced house. It was a clear blue morning, and she was going to accompany her daughter to the antenatal clinic. But she was in for a shock.

Her daughter was standing in the bathroom. "Just standing there," she said, "as if she had seen a ghost. As if she was stuck to the floor."

She was crying: "Mammy Mammy, what is that? That's not my child, is it?"

Her mother could not prevent the girl from seeing before her eyes a formless thing, lying on the ground. Something that might have emerged from under the floorboards.

She dragged her daughter into the bedroom. Put her lying down. And then went back to the bathroom, got a heap of tissue and toilet paper, and just picked it all up and took it to Casualty in a plastic bag where she explained everything to a nurse.

"I don't know," she said to the nurse, "if I done the right thing or not. I'm a very ignorant person. Did I do the right thing?"

In the days and weeks that followed, the daughter was very depressed. Her mother didn't want her to end up in the mental hospital. Her mother would take her out for walks through the town. And she'd get her to take all the clothes out of the presses, and sort them, and put them back again. She'd get her to mop the floor and clean it.

"Go out," she said to her daughter, "and if you were only to pull the grass with your bare hands, just do it."

And so, she kept on her case, until the daughter was well again.

The Travellers I met believed in Padre Pio and other visitors from the spirit world that brushed against them in the dark night. Padre Pio worked miracles for them. And there were other ghosts, and haunted roads, and the bad luck that comes from badly spoken words.

Their belief in saints was far removed from the naive literalism of children. It was a language of hope made necessary by fear, powerlessness, and injustice, which they faced every day.

It was a beautiful autumn in 1994. The yellow leaves did not fall until mid-November, and there was a stillness along the canal where the oak trees spread their canopy, and a fog enveloped the barge.

Each morning I headed for the halting site, with a notebook and tape recorder. I was delighted to be alive.

My friend Julia enjoyed an intuitive wisdom which could cast a shadow into the future.

As I left her trailer for the last time, I promised her I'd write a play someday, to honour her.

And she said, "You'll write lots of them.

"And put a ghost in it," she said. "The electric light has nearly all the ghosts wiped out."

I closed the door of the trailer behind me, and I never saw her again.