"Being a traveller in the North means being on the edge of everything and everyone - in every way," says Mr Mark Donahue (23).
The British government agrees. A report, published in 1989 by the Eastern Health and Social Services Board, described the living conditions of the North's 1,115 Travellers as "possibly the worst of any group in the United Kingdom".
A 1992 report, from the Northern Ireland Advisory Committee on Travellers, said Travellers' lives were often characterised by an absence of hot and cold running water, no safe means of disposing of sewage, no refuse collection, no safe playing areas, literacy rates of just 20 per cent and unemployment rates running at between 80 and 96 per cent.
Though born in Dublin - to an Irish Traveller father and his Welsh Romany wife - Mark, his parents and his four brothers and two sisters moved to Belfast when he was 16.
"We went up to get the boat to England for a change," he says. They didn't board in the end, however, choosing to settle instead at an illegal campsite on Glen Road, on the outskirts of west Belfast.
"There were no toilets, no electricity and just one tap for the whole site," he says. "It was much bigger than the site at Dunsink in Dublin."
Since last year his family has lived in settled housing in west Belfast. Another illegal campsite, at Windy Gap, near the city's Mona bypass, seemed likewise "flung" at the edge of "settled" life. It had been there for years, he says, with few people taking much notice of its residents.
"There were no services or anything, no one paid heed to it until private housing developments started up around it around four years ago. Then people started complaining about the Travellers being there, but it's still there."
The provision of halting sites is obligatory in England, Scotland and Wales. However, the Caravan Sites Act (NI) 1969 deems them just optional in Northern Ireland.
It is hard to say what impact the Troubles have had on the North's Travellers.
"Nothing much has been done for Travellers in the past 30 years. I suppose the main effect of the Troubles has been that Travellers moved into Catholic areas where before they might has stayed in Protestant or Catholic ones."
The majority of the Northern Travelling community is Catholic, though there are a number of English or Welsh-born Romanies "who would be Protestant".
He speaks, however, of a strong sense among Belfast's Travelling community of having been badly "let down" by the North's Catholics.
"When Catholics were being burned out of Bombay Street in 1970 the Travellers helped them move out with their lorries and vans, but the Catholics forgot them. There is a feeling that they were let down, that the oppressed became the oppressor."
Travellers have the same problems getting served in shops and bars as their Southern cousins. As far as opinion leaders are concerned, there have been memorably distasteful episodes such as that in 1982 when the then deputy lord mayor of Belfast, independent unionist Mr Frank Millar, called all Travellers "rubbish" and suggested that they should all be "incinerated".
Mark also feels that the North's Travellers, being a smaller community than that in the South (there are an estimated 22,000 Travellers in the Republic), have been less assertive, less organised and have known less about their rights than their Southern counterparts. Traditionally, Travellers in the North "stay to themselves".
"Family want to be around family." Their isolation has been exacerbated, he says, by their lower levels of education. While some go on to third level in the South, none have in the North.
Despite the best efforts of Mark's mother, the local "settled" school would not enrol him and after attending a "settled" school in Dublin, he had to go to a special Travellers' school, St Paul's, on the Falls Road.
The main difference between Travellers in the North and their counterparts in the South, according to Mr Paul Noonan, director of the Belfast Travellers' Education and Development Group, is that in the North they have, since 1997, been recognised as a minority ethnic group.
"In recent years there have been some 12 official reports on the conditions of Travellers in the North, including from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Parliamentary Standing Advisory Committee on Human Rights. However, it is only since the peace process that Travellers' issues have begun to be addressed."
A government task force is to report in May/June on how inequities suffered by Northern Travellers may be addressed. Mr Noonan claims no funding has been allocated to put its recommendations into effect.