"For the Protection of the Children": The Politics of Minority Childhood in Ireland

Abstract

This article examines politics of minority childhood in Ireland through an analysis of dominant discourses and published biographical and autobiographical accounts. The focus is on official constructions and experiences of Traveller children during decades preceding implementation of a state settlement policy in mid-1960s. Minority childhood is discussed within context of anti-Traveller racism, political economy of Irish childhood, and formulation of a Traveller settlement policy. [childhood, Ireland, Travelling People, racism, discourse] While scholarly study of children has been dominated by psychological approaches and a developmentalist paradigm, a growing number of scholars from other disciplines such as social history and sociology are contributing to a broader conceptualization of a and childhood studies. A central premise of renewed childhood scholarship is familiar anthropological observation that categories and social relations of age and generation (like those of gender, class, and race) are products of culture and society (for example, James and Prout 1990; Jenks 1996). Although anthropology has a long tradition of contributing cross-cultural cases to literature on development and socialization, it has tended to neglect broader contexts of childhood. Recent work has, however, used archival and ethnographic research to document connections between local constructions and experiences of childhood, and wider national and global political economies (for example, Scheper-Hughes 1992; Nieuwenhuys 1994, 1996; Stephens 1995; Stoler 1995). Jenks (1996) has argued that there has been a sacralization of the child in contemporary western society. This sacralization of childhood has made children central to political discourse as politicians have made use of rhetorical power derived from constructing various social problems as dangerous to children (Best 1994: 11). As a number of anthropologists have made clear however, political (and other) claims about needs, interests, and rights of children frequently rely upon a model of a universal modem childhood characterised by domestication, schooling, and a lack of productivity. Such a model obscures diversity of childhoods both within west and more globally (Boyden 1990; Stephens 1995; Nieuwenhuys 1996). Stephens has recently pointed out how, for example, in contemporary American context, notions of universal child, with pre-established needs and interests, tend to short-circuit more far-reaching political debates about . . . place of various groups of children-differentiated by class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and geographical location (1997: 8). Critical analyses of rhetorical invocation of childhood, and its relationship to lived experiences of diverse and unequal childhoods are a key area of research for renewed anthropology of childhood. This article combines an analysis of political discourse surrounding minority childhood in Ireland with an examination of published texts that allow for a partial reconstruction of minority childhood as lived experience. My focus is on children of indigenous minority population of Travelling People (also known in past as gypsies, tinkers, and itinerants) and covers decades that preceded implementation of a state-initiated Traveller settlement program in mid-1960s.1 I begin with a broad discussion of history of anti-Traveller racism and childhood in Ireland. Following this, parliamentary debates, press accounts, and government reports are used to show how anti-Traveller rhetoric and practice in these decades relied in part upon identification of Traveller and non-Traveller childhoods as being in need of protection from state. I suggest that problematizing of Traveller childhood during this period drew upon and reinforced models of modern childhood while also revealing contradictory aspects of Ireland's move toward a more interventionist welfare state. …