I’ve spoken many times to Shamus and Roseanna McPhee about the Tinker Experiments and the impact that living in the one remaining housing experiment has had, and continues to have, on their lives. Experiments that were given the green light by an 18951 report tabled at Westminster which, amongst other things, sought to address the ‘Tinker problem’ via enforced settlement and the trafficking of children to the colonies. State policy carried out in collaboration with Churches and Charities.
Each time I listen to their story I am struck by the liminality of the space created by that unholy trinity of State, Church and Charity. Both mention in the programme the feeling of living in a no-man’s land, an intermezzo,2 an in-between. A lonely and barren chamber where memories of prejudice and discrimination and lost hope and dreams of life partners and the joy of children and grandchildren reside. For, while the enforced sedentarism of their forebears opened up full time learning opportunities from school to post graduate level they were never accepted as equals by the settled community and in turn shunned by their own people. Too countryfied, too Gypsy Traveller. Forever suspended in a State constructed ‘state of exception’. A state of being which whilst we may consider would fit with war, civil war or unrest [see martial law in a state of emergency and so on] can equally apply to individuals and groups. Condemned as homo sacer [Trans: the accursed man], the individual or group is no longer protected by legal or civil rights and may be denied access to services, a decent place to live or attacked physically and emotionally with impunity.
And here we also see Foucault’s concept of monster at play. The problem of abnormality is posed; Gypsy Traveller culture is measured against the settled community’s most nomic characteristics, judged [by media and State] as beyond the limits of ‘acceptable’ and consequently the label of monster is both assigned and accepted with little, if any, dissent from the settled community. And as such, the individual or group may be attacked at will and those with ill intent, or even genocidal intentions, can act safe in the knowledge that state protections do not apply to those whom their prejudice and discrimination is directed. And thus, the victims of the Tinker Experiments become the accursed outcasts condemned to eternal wandering, forever to exist in a ‘state of exception’ a ‘zone of indistinction’, a liminal state.
A liminal state that despite a wealth of data gathered by victims and their supporters, a number of attempts over several decades, by Shamus, Roseanna and other human rights defenders to achieve recognition and reparation for the evident trauma of these policies and practices, and indeed evidence that an official apology is recognised as key to the creation of trauma free futures, government/s continue to erect, sometimes insurmountable, barriers to the realisation of this for the victims of the Tinker Experiments. It is beyond my ken why those in power, who have heard these stories and viewed the data, will not act now to re-right these heinous wrongs. A re-righting that would free all victims of the Experiments from those lonely and barren chambers and enable them to live their remaining years in the light.
1: Report of the Departmental Committee on Habitual Offenders, Vagrants, Beggars, and Inebriates in Scotland [1895].
2. I borrow the term intermezzo from Deleuze and Gutarri’s A Thousand Plateaus [1980] wherein their work ‘on becoming[a person, an entity]’ utilises the term ‘rhizome’ “to refer to ideas, concepts or assemblages with no fixed starting or finishing points which allow for multiple interpretations and developments [ergo] the rhizome has “no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”.
