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The ‘Final Solution’: Reformism, Ethnicity Denial and the Politics of Anti-Travellerism in Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2008

Robbie McVeigh
Robbie McVeigh*
Affiliation:
E-mail: robbiemcveigh@hotmail.com
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Abstract

The article identifies a resurgence of anti-Travellerism in post-Good Friday Agreement, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland – most obviously signalled by the ongoing Irish Government policy of ‘ethnicity denial’. It provides a comparative analysis of the different trajectories of state reformism with regard to Travellers in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland - from the promised ‘final solution’ to the ‘Traveller problem’ of the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963 through the high water mark of the 1995 Task Force Report. It finds a disturbing recrudescence of assimilationist, sedentarist and racist ideas and practices in contemporary state policies towards Travellers.

Type
Themed Section Care or Control? Gypsies, Travellers and the State
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 91 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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