'As a child, I was trying to deny being a Traveller, trying to fit in'
How poor experiences of education mean three-quarters of Irish Traveller children in Northern Ireland are still leaving school with fewer than five GCSEs
Mary-Patricia McGeough, an Irish Traveller from Armagh, has vivid memories of one “horrifying” class debate when she was a child.
“One of the questions was: ‘Are Travellers lazy and dirty? Is it a fact or is it opinion?’
She recalled other children saying: “Oh yes miss, they are smelly and dirty, see the caravans, knackers and tinkers”.
“I had my best friends, country people, and they're jumping up like ‘Hold a second, Mary-Patricia is a Traveller and her house is immaculate’. I was horrified.”
Now a mother herself, she is fighting for her own children to have a decent education. And she doesn’t want them to face the same challenges she did.
But as an exclusive investigation by The Detail has shown, the Department of Education’s strategy to improve Traveller children’s exam results and school attendance hasn’t been successful.
We found that three-quarters of all Traveller children are still leaving school with fewer than five GCSEs.
And Dr Robbie McVeigh, co-chair of a taskforce which prompted the strategy, said the department’s approach hasn’t been effective.
“It shows you that the strategy isn't working or hasn't worked.”
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be publishing more exclusives on Irish Travellers’ experiences of wider discrimination and housing in Northern Ireland. You can help support our work by subscribing and sharing our emails with your friends.
Stormy weather
Last month was one of the wettest Aprils in living memory. And May has already seen some unseasonably hot weather and heavy rain.
Environmental activist Rosalind Skillen says that we’re not just having a spell of bad weather.
Chichester Street in Belfast city centre is named after Sir Arthur Chichester
Decolonising our street names
Last year, The Detail published a series of investigations on Lough Neagh, whose bed and banks are owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an English aristocrat based in Dorset.
A territorial claim to the lough was initially made in the early 1600s by Sir Arthur Chichester, a leading figure in the Plantation of Ulster.
Chichester Street in Belfast is named after Sir Arthur. But there has been renewed support for a petition calling for the street to be renamed McCracken Street after United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken and his sister Mary Ann, a life-long campaigner against slavery.
What do you think?
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