A Right Royal Traveller Wedding

No, I’m not referring to the recent marriage of the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth, Zara Phillips to Mike Tindall

Due to my injuries, I’ve have oodles of time to catch up on television series, movies, documentaries and the like. Late one night while channel surfing, I stumbled upon a TLC documentary curiously titled “My Big Fat Royal Gypsy Wedding”. The series follows the wedding planning of a Traveller girl. Irish Travellers, sometimes called gypsies or roma, are a group of Irish who keep their culture to themselves. There is a tradition among the traveller community to throw extravagant weddings for traveler daughters complete with spectacularly ginormous gowns. The dress is seen as paramount to the wedding, not sure where the husband fits into the scheme.

There is a voyeristic quality to this documentary and in fairness one does not get the full picture of the Traveller lifestyle through this documentary.  It is important to note that numerous traveller boys and men asked for their faces to be obscured as they feared identification would inhibit their ability to find work.

What one learns is that the Traveller community is openly discriminated against through out Ireland and Britain. The tradition of some traveller girls is to leave school around age 11 to help support their family.  Considered a spinster by age 20, many girls are engaged or married soon after their 16th birthday. This norm is accepted within the Traveller community and condoned by the Catholic Church.

The girls favor dressing extremely provocatively, yet premarital sex is considered taboo. Drinking is also prohibited for girls.  Boys courts girls using a practice called ‘grabbing’ at social events. Grabbing is an accepted social norm within the community. Imagine your daughter being grabbed by the hair, arm or frog marched by a traveller boy to a quiet spot where he can kiss her. If she refuses, he hurts her until she complies.

This is not courtship, it is flat out assault.  Granted this documentary focuses on the outlandish features of the traveller community, I suspect this is fringe behavior and the producers where on the lookout for attention grabbing action.

As disturbing as I find grabbing,  illiteracy is a bigger problem within this community. I found a clip of a traveller girl who has other plans for her life. She works in a bake shop frequented by traveller girls looking for their dream wedding cake.  Noreen has continued her education and she shares her 16th birthday celebration with friends at a paintball range. Typical western teenage behavior, except that Noreen has to sign off on waivers for all her friends as she states to the employee, ‘half of these (her friends) are dyslexic, they can’t read or write’.   One can only image the serious legal/safety implications these business face when dealing with travelers.

At first I was put off by the blatant discriminiation documented in this series, however, in light of additional information, I now can understand why businesses would be hesitant to deal with Travellers.

Take home message – a housewife traveller life is no life for me.

Posted on August 05, 2011  ::  Categories: Entertainment
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