Room to Roma
People from Eastern Europe begging on Irish streets are an increasingly common sight. What motivates them to travel across an entire continent to sit shivering outside a suburban Spar? And what happens to the families they bring with them?
Dermot Stokes, 19 Aug 2010
As I went to buy the morning paper on Friday, a scrawny man with bare feet shuffled along the pavement, carefully selected a spot right outside the shop and threw down his blanket. When I returned a few minutes later he was well settled in, empty disposable coffee cup raised to the passing trade.
It's an increasingly familiar sight. The man in question is a Roma. Oddly, he set up a mere fifty metres from another Roma pitch belonging, if that's the word, to a middle-aged woman who sells the Big Issue. Hers is a good spot, a steady earner…
These two are like chalk and cheese. The woman is part of the street furniture. In Irish terms, she's what you might call first-wave Roma. She's just the ticket for a neighbourhood wanting to be seen to be nice to mendicant immigrants.
The man is different. He's second wave Roma, ragged, barefooted, malnourished and to the Hog reminiscent of wild-eyed beggars encountered on central and Eastern European streets in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the old Soviet order collapsed.
I mentioned him to Lady Hog and she said'oh yeah, I've seen that guy there. He shakes all over'. Which he does. But he wasn't shaking when he was choosing his spot…
Where did he spring from that morning? Is he sleeping somewhere nearby that he emerged from and plonked himself down right there at nine thirty? Or was he driven there and told to earn his keep? It couldn't all be a performance, could it?
And what's he doing in Dublin? I know he's begging, but looking at him shivering there and it only August, inevitably one wonders why he and his family – for surely they're here too – made a lengthy trek to Ireland. To live barefoot? Surely not, but if not, then why?
Who knows? But things are happening beneath the surface of what we see and think we know. Some of them are beyond our control and many challenge what we like to think we believe.
Roma and Travellers are under pressure all across Europe. On one hand, there is a rising tide of populist attacks that has been compared with ethnic cleansing. On the other, there is a growing official clampdown in wealthier states, particularly in Germany, Italy, France and the UK.
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