IF EVER Senator Eileen Flynn thinks she is in danger of becoming “big-headed” with her grand new title, a trip back home to Labre Park – Ireland’s first purpose-built housing scheme for Travellers – in Ballyfermot, west Dublin, quickly disabuses her of any ‘notions’.
“I’m just ‘Eileen’, but I have to take a lot of ribbing from my family in Ballyfermot,” she laughs good-humouredly, speaking on the phone from her ‘other’ home in Ardara, Co Donegal, where she lives with fisherman husband, Liam, and their 19 month-old daughter, Billie.
“They all take a real laugh out of me and say things like, ‘Oh, here comes the senator’ but they’re the best in the world and would take the coat off their back to give it to you if you needed it.”
Not that this Irish senator – who made history by becoming the first woman from the Travelling community to sit in the Seanad after being nominated by Taoiseach Mícheál Martin last year – ever needs to be reminded of where she comes from. A community development worker with the National Traveller Women’s Forum and activist who has campaigned on issues including homelessness, same-sex marriage and hate crime, she has spent most of her adult life fighting prejudice and discrimination from every corner.
“My reason for being in this role is to get the message out there that we [Travellers] are just as good and play an equal part in Irish society,” she says. “Although we’re not seen to be in the ‘big’ jobs, we are there. I know a doctor who works in a hospital in Dublin but feels he has to hide his identity and I know Traveller physios, school principals and those working on the front line in the health service fighting Covid.
“My auntie works in a nursing home and when I got appointed as senator, even she felt unable to say, ‘That’s my niece’. She said it was the talk of the nursing home when it was on the news, but she, like many Travellers, couldn’t reveal her true identity. So, that is the reality of it – we all do what we need to do to get by and it’s really tough.”
For her own part, Eileen chose the path ‘less travelled', although the irony is not lost on her that should those Travellers who have carved out hard-won and successful careers among ‘the settled community’ choose to stand up and be counted, it might make her own job a heck of a lot easier.
But then life never handed Eileen Flynn any free passes. Born and reared on a halting site with her parents and eight siblings, including her twin, Sally (to whom she remains close and who also works with a Traveller NGO (Non-governmental Organisation) in Dublin, she lost her beloved mother to pneumonia at the age of 10 and suffered multiple injuries in a serious traffic accident a few days later.
She struggled through secondary school with dyslexia – and was suspended on several occasions for rebellious behaviour – but Eileen and Sally broke through the system’s invisible barriers to make history by becoming the first Travellers from Labre Park to enter third-level education.
Her story is a fascinating one and as an engaging, articulate and passionate speaker – and a graduate in community development from Maynooth University – Ms Flynn is sure to captivate audiences at this year’s Imagine! Belfast (online) festival, speaking on the topic ‘Everyday Racism’.
Former taoiseach Enda Kenny may have given formal recognition for Travellers as a distinct ethnic group in 2017, but everyday racism is still an ugly, everyday reality according to Eileen, who featured in a BBC ‘100 ‘Women’ list last year, along with another Irishwoman, Lucy Monaghan, a campaigner for changes to the legal system in Northern Ireland.
“When I was growing up, I was aware of going to the shop with my mother and being watched, but it was only when I became an adult that I recognised that as inequality,” she says. “My mother was always trying to give the staff in the shop reassurance that her children didn’t rob.
“Then, when I was older, in my late teens and early 20s, I would be stopped going into a nightclub or a pub in Dublin because of my accent, but I soon got past the point of hiding who I am. I gave up saying I was from the country, from Kilkenny [for example]. I saw and experienced discrimination in so many walk of life, from the Garda, to the Church, to school and healthcare settings and I want to change that for the next generation.”
She can’t wait to take part in the Imagine! festival, although regrets not being able to travel and speak to people at a live event.
“I’m disappointed not to be going to Belfast in person because for years I have followed the festival. I have some relations in Belfast and I work alongside some of the NGOs there and I love the city and its people. At the moment, I am trying to form a national Traveller organisation taking in the north, because we are all living on one island and yet there are different regulations everywhere.
“I think the Trespassing Act, for instance, has an equal effect on Travellers in the north of Ireland as it does in the south because people, say, from Derry, may want to come to Donegal during the summer. The Trespassing Act is state discrimination because it stops Travellers from being a nomadic group of people.
“There are so many ways we can learn from each other – like the health system is better in Northern Ireland and the Irish government could take something from that. For me, the Belfast festival will be great opportunity to get that message out there to people, how much we all need to work together.”
There are many other things that keep this young mother awake at night – and it’s not Billie who, by her own account, is a “great baby”. Equal access to education for Travellers is a main bugbear and lack of culturally appropriate accommodation another.
She is also on the record as saying she won’t rest until she has helped push through hate crime legislation in Ireland and, more recently, she has decided to champion reproductive healthcare equality for women after believing she was undermined in the maternity hospital while having Billie – an experience she blames, in part, to her anxiety and post-natal depression in the weeks that followed the birth.
“I got told my whole life, ‘You’re a f***ing eejit,” says the woman who once challenged an angry man twice her size for dumping his rubbish on the Travellers’ site where she lived – and was “followed” for three weeks afterwards – “and you’ll never be anything but a Traveller.
“When I was younger, I would have done a lot of voluntary work and my father would have said to me, ‘Jeez, Eileen, if you keep working for nothing, you’ll never be idle, but I said, ‘Some day, Daddy, there’s going to be change in the world and I want to be part of it’. Now I want that better world for Billie.”
:: Senator Eileen Flynn will be speaking at the Imagine! Belfast festival of ideas and politics on March 27 at 4pm. Visit imaginebelfast.com
