Many would regard Rosie Joyce (30) as an unusual Traveller. Some may even feel she is not a real Traveller. Rosie, along with her husband David and their three children, lives in a house.
After 10 years in a mobile home by the side of the road, they were allocated a four-bedroom house by Meath County Council two years ago. Travelling, however, does not the Traveller make, she says.
"Why should four walls change who you are?" she asks. "My parents moved into a house when I was six and there was no doubt always that we were definitely Travellers. When I got married then, when I was 18, I went back into a trailer. David was living in a trailer."
Sitting at the kitchen table in the bright, airily modern house on the outskirts of Navan, this third-level graduate and employee of Meath Vocational Educational College looks down at her youngest child asleep in her playpen. Claire, 16 months, is one of the reasons she wanted a house.
"I really enjoyed living in a trailer," she says. "I suppose we wanted more space. It was a big change for us all," she continues, but apart from missing the other children at the halting site, their then two, David (10) and Caitriona (8), "didn't pay much heed to moving".
Not all Travellers who make the move into settled accommodation do so with such ease. Indeed, according to research carried out in 1995, many return to the road, the strain of living in a house becoming too much to bear - for a variety of reasons. These may include difficulties coping with the financial commitments of settled life, being shunned by settled neighbours, a restlessness stemming from psychological difficulties in adjusting to living in one place permanently, missing the proximity and support of other Travellers and a prohibition on intrinsic aspects of Traveller life such as keeping horses and working with scrap metal on-site.
The apparent ease with which Rosie and David adjusted to settled life may stem as much from their youth as from the fact that she had already lived much of her life in a house. She is also clearly a confident, tough and resilient young woman.
"Some people prefer to stay in trailers. It's down to personal preference, but I don't consider we've given up anything of ourselves. Being a Traveller is about the rules you live by. It's an attitude to life, the value you place on your type of existence. Family and the here and now are the most important things - more than property, where you're from or where you live. You are who your people make you, and why should I change to suit settled people's attitudes. If they have a problem with who I am, that's their problem."
The most important thing to a Traveller, she says - as have all Travellers this series has spoken to - is the extended family.
"Of course we are still very much in touch with our families. David has three sisters in Navan. My mother and father are in a house near here and I have six brothers and a sister in Navan too. Not a week would go by that they wouldn't call in."
The other milestone in Rosie's life which many would feel, mistakenly in her view, marks her out as an unusual Traveller is her education. Even though she, like 88 per cent of Traveller children, left mainstream education after primary school, she took a training course in the Navan Traveller Training Centre when she was 15. She got secretarial work there when she was 17, did a number of computer courses and, when she was 26, was encouraged to apply for a general and teacher training diploma at Dublin City University.
"I was very hesitant about it," she says. "To be honest, I was terrified." Asked whether this was because she was a Traveller, she says no, that her fears centred around the fact that she had never been to secondary school, never mind university.
"But, yes, there were just two Travellers in the class. The others in the class were fine. I think they found us a source of information. They hadn't known Travellers before. We did socialise a good bit with them, but we didn't go to pubs and clubs every week. I had to drive back here every evening, but at the end of term we would definitely have gone out with the class, yes. I wouldn't say there was a great pull between the two `worlds'."
Following DCU she took a further six-month course in Information Technology in Navan and today teaches computers one day a week, as well as working for the local VEC as an information officer helping Traveller children transfer from primary to secondary school.
"Some of them are very bright," she says, adding that "hopefully" as many as possible will go on to third-level education. Progress to third level is almost unheard of among Travellers, however, and those who do tend to do so on the basis of affirmative action.
The obstacles to Traveller children's progress up the education ladder are well documented - resistance on the part of some school authorities to enrolling Traveller children, the fear of some parents that education may be "settled" society's means of "reforming" their children, the sense among many Travellers that they are not going to be employed anyway so why get further education, and the fact that many parents are semi-literate and unable to help their children with homework.
Despite these, Rosie is clear that she could not have achieved what she has without that intrinsic aspect of Traveller culture - the strong family network.
"If someone said 10 years ago that I would achieve what I have I wouldn't have believed them. I couldn't have done it without an awful lot of support, encouragement and help with the children from David's and my family."
More tomorrow