Where Santa comes down the skylight... Christmas with the 'forgotten travellers' of Cork
IT’S LASHING rain and the deep wet muck that surrounds the gleaming caravan is clinging to our shoes. We kick them off, then huddle together inside.
The Cork born grand-matriarch that is Bridget (Bridgie) O’Reilly, is warm, engaging and quietly philosophical.
Surrounded by two sons, their wives, a nephew, his wife, her sister, and a merry troop of beautiful babies and toddlers, she holds forth on the topic closest to her heart: the wellbeing of her eight children and 10 grandchildren.
We women are sitting side by side on a pristine, u-shaped, built-in sofa. Between us and on our laps sit the beautiful cherubs; some sleeping, some shyly smiling.
As we chat, the men remain standing. There’s no space for them to sit down.
A few paces from where we’re gathered is a comfortable looking, well-dressed bed.
That’s separated from the seating area by a tiny worktop which has just enough space for a hob.
An enormous water container beside the caravan door tells its own story; that this is a home with no running water and no bathroom.
It’s a home in which electricity comes courtesy of a generator; one that only gets turned on at night, because it’s so expensive to run.
For all the hardship these challenges bring, there’s excitement among the youngsters present.
Eyes shining, they’re counting the sleeps to Christmas.
The caravan we’re in belongs to one of Bridgie’s sons.
There are two more caravans parked nearby.
One is home to another of her sons; the other to a nephew of hers.
All three of the men live here with their wives and young families.
‘Here’ is an unofficial camp site in the Blackpool area of Cork City. It’s home to these families because there’s no space for them in any of the four halting sites in the area, and because while they’ve been on the housing list for years, there’s no sign of any houses for them.
“We’re not asking for miracles,” says Bridgie, “all my family is asking for is a home address, so that they can have a better chance of getting the jobs they apply for, so they can access their social welfare payments while they’re looking for work and so they can get their post delivered and their rubbish removed like everyone else.”
“Sitting here in the caravan takes me back to the early seventies when I was a young girl growing up in caravans on the side of the road,” says Bridgie.
“A community bus brought us to and from school. But often, when we drove back to where they picked us up that morning, we’d find that my family would have been moved on. This was terrifying for us kids.
“It hurts to remember my family being towed around when I was a little child and to see my family and their small babies getting similar treatment all these decades later.
“Not one of my children has ever been in trouble with the law. Yet, here they are living in these small, damp caravans with nowhere to go.”
“In the Traveller Visibility Group (TVG) — where I work — we call families like ours ‘the forgotten travellers’,” says Bridgie’s youngest sister, Nora Cash.
“Because these families can’t provide a valid address to the authorities, there’s huge hardship because they’re being hounded to move but given nowhere to move to.
“At TVG we try to link in with them as best we can but really there is nothing we can do only support them.”
As for how they cope, Nora says: “Many keep their heads down and their mouths shut in the hope of simply being left to live in peace in their homes.”
“My family does not stay silent,” says Bridgie. “We try hard to have our problems heard by those with power to resolve them, in the hope of being treated justly. My children do this while living on waste ground in third world conditions. Here they have no toilets and no running water.
“Now can you picture their children playing outside these caravans with their toys on Christmas morning, while standing up to their ankles in wet muck? It’s dangerous for them and not just because of the stream with its dirty water but because of the rats that live here.
The young women say that Christmas ‘is not much’ in conditions like this. “It’s hard to focus on it,” they say.
“Because of what we have to go through every day, we don’t look forward to it to be honest. We don’t feel safe here. There’s no power for outside lights and there are holes in the railings that surround us.“
When they think of Christmas, what does that feel like?
“For the families living here it feels like depression,” says Nora. “We a try to focus on Christmas but it’s hard with all of our worries and problems.
“The fact that this site has long been associated with tragedy for this family does not help. Fifty years ago our grandparents and great grandparents moved on from here when a little girl — a relative of ours — drowned on these grounds.
“This space brought misfortune to our family years ago so they moved away. Yet here we are back again; the same family living on the same heart-breaking spot.”
For Bridgie sitting in this caravan brings her back to her own childhood Christmases.
“In the evenings, I’d walk around the houses to see the big Christmas trees lighting up the living rooms. I’d stand for a long time gazing at them, delighting in them; because we never had the space for one of those trees in our small caravan.
“Today my children are still living in cramped caravans,” says Bridgie. “My grand-niece bought her little boy a walker for Christmas, but had to return it as there wasn’t space for him to travel up and down in it.”
Despite the hardship it’s clear that the family tries, for the sake of the youngsters, to create a positive Christmas spirit.
It’s clear they’ve succeeded when the little ones point to the skylight while informing me matter of factly that it’s through there that Santa will climb with their gifts.
Remembering her childhood Christmases Bridgie says: “Back then, the mothers made paper flowers coming up to Christmas and sold them door-to-door.
“The fathers cut, delivered and sold Christmas trees, logs, wreaths and holly. Those old traditions have since been lost, and the older travellers feel that loss more acutely than anybody else.”
Insisting that she was lucky growing up because her family had a stove in their caravan, she explains: “We loved hearing that Santy would come down that chimney with our presents. We’d be so excited by that.
“I remember Christmas Eve as being really exciting. In the evening our mother would place a dish of warm water on the floor, then wash us one by one.
“That was her way of bathing us. When she’d have one of us washed, she’d throw out the water, then fill up the dish again for the next child.
“While the washing was going on we’d be thinking of the new clothes we would be wearing the next day.
“Now they mightn’t be new, they might be hand-me-downs, but they were new to us.
“By the time Christmas morning came we’d have been up a load of times during the night checking to see if Santy had come.
“We’d be woken at about six o clock and straight away we’d begin tearing the paper off of our presents — which would be whatever our parents could get for us at the time. We couldn’t go into a shop and say ‘I want this, this and this for Christmas’ like kids do today.”
There were eight kids in Bridgie’s family so with the parents there were 10 for Christmas dinner.
“If we were living beside a convent, the nuns would roast our turkey for us. We used to love the Christmas dinner, especially back in the childhood days when we lived in a camp and later in a horse-drawn, bell top wagon and later again in a caravan. I moved into a house nine years go, but that’s where I came from.
“As kids we used to be delighted with ourselves because Christmas was the one day of the year that we most looked forward to.
There would always be a big campfire burning outside. My mother and her friends would cook and bake over those fires.
“We loved when our mother baked bread. As kids, we would sit chatting, all warm and happy while waiting to get a slice of it, with the butter melting all over it. That was always gorgeous.
“There would always be a lot of storytelling around that fire and sometimes someone might sing a song. My mother was a great singer. She won a prize for singing. My father was musical too. He had a melodeon. Now he’d be playing that away in the evenings and we’d love listening to him.”
What’s the plan for Christmas Eve?
“Hopefully it’ll very exciting for the whole lot of us please God,” says Bridgie. “The kids will be looking forward to Santy coming.”
Above their heads, jolly snowman stickers decorate the caravan windows. They and a bare miniature plastic Christmas tree are the only festive decorations on show.
But somehow that doesn’t matter at all, because this small caravan is filled with love, and within its walls dwells the true spirit of Christmas.
Twitter: @ritadebrun
