FROM THE ARCHIVES - JANUARY 11th, 1966:There was a prolonged battle between Dublin Corporation and a group of travellers squatting at Cherry Orchard in the mid-1960s, including the demolition by the corporation of a school built by the travellers and their supporters on the site. In the final part of a series of articles about the living conditions of travellers on the site, Mary Maher graphically described the encampment in today's newspaper in 1966.
NO ONE walks out of Joe Donohoe’s hut. It is a matter of burrowing out, like an animal from an underground tunnel. I stood for a moment trying to determine the best path and decided that there was none. It had begun to drizzle again and the whole camp was embedded in muck that curled and sucked against my boots.
Mr Donohoe is the spokesperson for the Cherry Orchard tinkers, and his house is at the far end of a circular row of about 20 hovels. The Donohoe home is a shocking testimony to poverty, but it is in far better condition than most of the other tinkers’ houses.
Small square shacks, thrown together from rotten plywood, sheets of metal, and ragged blankets, were scattered along the camp’s edge. Donkeys and horses were tethered to several entrances.
There was iron scrap everywhere: squashed car frames, rusted bed springs, junked heaps of unrecognisable origin, half-sunken in the earth. But a transistor radio sounded, about true love, from the doorstep of one caravan, and there were fires burning in front of several shacks; life, however squalid and unlovely, was proceeding as usual.
For the next two hours I looked for a woman, a wife and mother, to tell me something of the home life of an itinerant. I found two, neither of whom had children, and another whose children were growing. She told me simply: “It’s very hard; you’re gone all day and you don’t know when you come back will your children be alive or dead.”
I sat on a kettle in one burlap tent, talking to two middle-aged men, an old woman and a young girl. They were polite but non-committal. “This’s been going on four years, missus. Nobody will do anything about it,” said one of the men. I asked if he thought Joe Donohoe could do more to relieve the misery of the camp than Grattan Puxon had, and he snorted briefly and spat into the fire.
They wished me a happy New Year when I left and assured me that I would be welcomed back on a visit anytime, and they continued to sit, in a kind of resigned stupor about the fire.
I was reminded of the migrant Oklahoma farmers in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; these people do not survive, they merely endure. The children are different. I talked to a dozen of them, all crusted with time-worn filth, and charged with exuberant good spirits and energy.
Some are better off than others because they live in caravans. There are four at Cherry Orchard, nicely painted and decorated with a reckless variety of scrollish designs. I didn’t succeed in getting inside any of them.
The women are not at home in Cherry Orchard. Two small girls were playing house in one shack and came to the door to show me their dolls, gifts from Santa. The tiny room they played in contained one bed, a shelflike arrangement covered with a soiled yellow rug. One said that she and her two sisters slept there. The floor was lined in wet, dirty newspaper and littered like the bottom of a dustbin.
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