Last week, at a moving and charming occasion, a group of women and girls from the travelling community presented a booklet of pieces, written by themselves and others like themselves, to an enthusiastic audience in the training centre where they'd learned to read and write. St Basil's in Tallaght was bright for the special day, and the big table in the kitchen was covered with trays of wonderful savouries and scones, hot out of the oven and heaped with jam and cream.
The women who read things out had big hairstyles and jewellery, and high platform shoes on bare legs, and shy smiles. Seventeen children, one of them had. Fourteen, another. "What happens in the travelling community if you can't have children?" "Oohhh," they shook their heads.
What happens to the 13-year-old if she has an abortion? They shook their heads, grimly. What happens if she doesn't? They shook their heads, equally grimly. These splendid women have great power in the home, and they serve those homes with unremitting labour. But they had never said one word in public before last week's little event. They have absolutely zero social standing, and they have neither influence nor power.
Read what they write - the simple accounts of humiliations endured at the hairdresser, in the pub, in the shop, at school, in the launderette. Read their descriptions of living among rats and mud. Then ask yourself, how is that these wrongs persist? The answer is: we have power; they have none.
All it would take to transform the traveller problem is for settled Ireland to allow 3,000 units of accommodation to be built. Somewhere. Fat chance. The sudden lavishing of attention on one traveller child because she is pregnant is enough to make you sick. Where were all of us when she was born herself into absolute disadvantage?
The traveller women accept, in their world, a role for women that I wouldn't accept in mine. But there's far more of them than there are of me. Among millions, if not billions of people on the planet, things are organised between the sexes as they are by the travellers. The men go out. The women stay in. They rear the children. They are estimated according to their fecundity. So I think, anyway. I know very little about being a traveller.
ONE of the consequences of being powerless is that the powerful don't need or want to know about you. This applies to all the powerless. The faceless Egyptian gunmen who suddenly from out of nowhere jumped on the tourists and pumped bullets into them and slashed them with knives and violated the women even as they killed them - they seem figures of nightmare to us. There's no explanation for them. That's what we say.
Maybe the assassins were all mad. But perhaps they were driven mad. There were a few books for sale in Luxor airport, the once I was there. Most of them were about ancient Egypt, because that's what the tourists are interested in, looking blandly past all the real, living Egyptians to the time of the Pharaohs, the same as we look past the travellers and weep for the dispossessed who are safely dead.
But there was one book by an American who had spent several years living among the stonepoor peasantry almost exactly where last week's massacre happened - across the river from Luxor, on the way to the tourist sights.
If you read that book, and take in what it says about lives of incessant toil unchanged for a thousand years, about the violence and frustration and hopelessness that are the condition of fellaheen life, you might begin to understand how the passion of fundamentalism is aroused. You might see why other people can become unreal to people who know themselves to be invisible in the large world, and despised within the small world around them, and who have been made savage by this knowledge.
The details that are beginning to emerge about the world some Irish travellers inhabit are as exotic to most of us as if they'd come from the edge of the Sahara. They show what is universally true: powerlessness is bad for people. It stupefies them. The children's allowance book is handed over to a money-lender. A child is raped and beaten. A woman is raped lying beside her disabled husband. Children are living in a heap of mud, ostracised even by their own.
No outside writer, as far as I know, has ever spent four years with Irish travellers. The settled community wants to see and hear as little as possible about travellers. How much have the objections to an anonymous but altogether eloquent photo of the miserable caravans which were home to the raped child have to do with not wanting to know? How much privacy have we granted to people who live in the mud on the edge of the road without toilets or water in any case, that suddenly privacy is so precious now?
The attention lavished on a traveller family now is an item on someone else's agenda, not their own. The small children in the family of the raped child suddenly have colour photos of foetuses to play with on their cold and muddy roadside. They were brought to the caravan by anti-abortion activists.
"Don't kill the baby," the small children have learnt they are to say to their pregnant sister. So someone who was with them last week told me. You have to laugh: Muslim fundamentalism is mad, and potentially bad, we assume. Christian fundamentalism, however, is just fine.
The raped 13-year-old is an emblem, not a person. Let her stand for all travellers, all people at the bottom of all societies, all the multiply disempowered. The baby grows within her whether she likes it or not. And as for her self - her thoughts and feelings and sense of her own position - she is, as a consequence of the helplessness which allowed a rapist to overpower and violate her, more a site of battle, and a provider of opportunities for others, than a person.
If she gives the baby up for adoption it will be held against her in her community. If she doesn't, the baby has a feared and hated father. It will be held against her that she was raped in the first place.
The travelling culture is very strict on women. They must be virgins when they marry and they must have children. Youth Defence is a partner in this world-view. They say she must have the baby.
Last week was a good time to be with the travelling girls and women in Tallaght. They were born into nothing. They have addresses in fields. Yet there they are, doing voter education, driving lessons, numeracy . . . I met one who has a responsible job: she is housekeeper in the house of a woman she met in - guess what? - her meditation group.
There they were - smiling, but always reserved. If we knew more about them we'd fear them less. We'd see how richly they respond to even the smallest crumbs from our table. It is we, the powerful, who will not change. We set up the society in which this defenceless child was raped into motherhood. We did it, not them. We passed by their broken caravans with the unseeing eyes of tourists. And we will again tomorrow.