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Travellers as the antisettlement: TraVision, ‘To Be Settled or to Be Unsettled? The Historical Formation of the Settled Population in Ireland’, Zenodo, 22/10/26

23Oct26

Abstract: This Traveller-led paper examines how settlement became the dominant institutional and cultural standard in Ireland. It distinguishes Gaelic habitation from colonial settlement and the later administrative division between Travellers and a settled majority. Drawing on historical documents, legislation, government reports and Traveller testimony, I examine changes in landholding, livelihood, schooling and public authority. Native incorporation and settler descendants’ changing Irish belonging are followed through conquest, plantation, famine, land purchase and independence. The Commission on Itinerancy (1963) and the Programme for the Settlement of Travellers—Ireland (1975) show how the state prescribed the surrounding population as the destination of assimilation. Population genetics informs the demographic comparison; stress and microbiome research illuminate relationships between bodies, environments and imposed change. I argue that the authority of settledness was made through institutions acting across a population divided by ancestry, class, religion and region. Understanding that formation places the settled standard itself under examination and requires those institutions to account for its continued enforcement.


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