Events for Traveller Pride are more to the fore locally from today.
The annual national festivities started last week and, as part of that, the community across Carlow and Kilkenny has been taking part in a range of online activities.
Michael Nolan is a Traveller Men’s Health Worker based at St Catherine’s Community Centre in Carlow and he’s been telling KCLR News “The theme for this year’s Traveller Pride Week 2021 is ‘Stronger Together’ celebrating how Travellers have held firm as a community and supported one another throughout the Pandemic, Traveller Pride is our opportunity to celebrate culture, language and history of the Irish Traveller community”.
He adds “Due to the Covid-19 this year, we are running a social media Traveller Pride campaign providing photos and videos of Traveller Pride in previous years and other events that the Traveller programme in Carlow has supported and if you would like to know more or have a look you can go to St Catherine’s Facebook page”.
In Kilkenny, a number of in-person are being added to the mix from today (Tuesday).
Helena Power says”I think it’s something that Travellers really do look forward to every year and I think that it’s a great chance for young Travellers to instil that sense of pride within themselves and within the community and not to let them lose their culture or their identity either”.
She thinks it’s really important for people to know the week is taking place, noting “Just to celebrate the culture and to promote Travellers in a positive light, which is really important, it gives people I suppose a chance to see Traveller culture and not the normal I suppose that they’re used to, to get the different part of Traveller culture, to get the singing and the dancing, the storytelling, we have artists we have lots of different things going on throughout the week that we’re very lucky to here in Kilkenny so it’s great for people to be able to see Traveller pride in a positive light and see the Travellers in a positive light”.
As you can see above, the events begin with a special event that rolls out at Butler Gallery. Of this Helena says “So that’s a group of recordings that was done in 2012 by a man called Colm Power, he went around the city and the county talking to different Travellers and getting their life stories so we have arranged a small collaboration of those and they are going to be played every day, from 12pm until 1:30pm then we’re going to have members of the community there to speak”.
Helena also recently spoke to our Sue Nunn on The Way It Is – hear that chat here:
Meanwhile, hear about the local project that won at the Health Service Excellence Awards here
