The fight for justice: The Barrett family of Galway
The following newspaper clippings concern a Galway Traveller family named Barrett. Perhaps the individuals named Barrett in these stories are not actually related, though taking Traveller marriage customs into account, the likelihood is that they are. What is sure is that they are all Travellers, and on that basis alone they are worth viewing as a piece.
Due to their lifestyle, Traveller families remain largely unrecorded by official history records. We receive occasional glimpses of such histories buried in the newspaper columns of court proceedings. We only hear Traveller voices when they are speaking as defendants. The only traces of depreciated minority populations are to be found in such public records, when they are found at all. Such has been the case with the Barrett family. A member of the Barrett family came to public prominence in 1996. Francie Barrett, then nineteen years old, represented Ireland at the Atlanta Olympics. This would seem to offer a happy ending to the sorrowful annals of the Barretts, an end to the prejudice and injustice. Such was not the case. Following is a 1931 account mentioning a man of the name Barrett:
“In No Man’s Land: Galway Squatters to be Evicted” Connacht Tribune 7 Nov. 1931: 7.
William Matthews and John Burke, Water-Lane, Galway, brought an action against James Barrett and Patrick Ward for trespass on property at Water-Lane, Galway…Burke swore that…these two men came along and built ‘shacks’ on it…Burke said even if these people paid rent for the place it would not be accepted as the Board of Health served notice on the owners that the premises were unfit for human habitation…Barrett swore that he was in occupation of the premises for the last four years…Ward…had a wife and seven children there and if he went out he had nowhere to go except the side of the road. He was willing to pay rent for the place or buy it. The Justice said he was satisfied these men were trespassers [and fined them].
In this case, two of the most common and numerous Galway Traveller family names, Ward and Barrett, are not even acknowledged as such. The newspaper describes them as squatters, and the court treats them as such. Their ethnic identity is denied by not being referred to, because to do so would problematise their treatment. There is no concern expressed as to the fate of the men and their families, once they have left the property.
...d for you to sign and the land will be yours... no-one will bother you on your land” (pg.105). This incident leads to a long chain of corrupt acts. All community members signed, rather, finger printed the document and we’re assured “they could rely on this paper as it is the title to the land” (pg. 105). Two years passed and they returned with the document in hand, claiming the land was no longer theirs to live off of. The signed document was in truth an agreement to live on the land for a mere two years and a promise to uproot once the two years expired. In conjunction with the Labour Unions, Rigoberta’s father fights this upheaval, however the landowners bribe the judges lawyers and interpretors involved in the crooked legal battles, twisting the communities stance says the landowners offered a great deal of money to the judge through -machines/market/lawyers
The need for the law to recognise possessory and equitable interests in land under a system of registration of title is a contested issue in Australia. The term ‘title’ means the extent of ownership over property as recognised by the legal system. For the purpose of this essay, a system of registration of title means the Torrens title system. The protection of possessory and equitable interests in Western Australia will be discussed, with reference to the Torrens title system and real property. It will be argued that there is still a need for the law to recognise equitable interests in land, however, the Torrens framework does remove the need for the law for the law to recognise possessory interests, in particular the doctrine of adverse possession.
The issue is what duty of care did C.D. Management owe to Richard. Mounsey v. Ellard, held that a landowner owes a duty of reasonable care to all lawful visitors. 363 Mass. 693, 707 (1973). The Court stated “that there is significant difference in the legal status of one who trespasses on another's land as opposed to one who is on the land under some color of right-such as a licensee or invitee.” Id at n.7. Although the general rule for care owed to trespassers is to refrain from willful, wanton, or reckless conduct. Schofield v. Merrill 386 Mass. 244, 245 (1982). Mounsey allowed for the possibility of exceptions when dealing with trespassers, “The possible difference in classes of trespassers is miniscule compared to the
Landlords virtually vanished and the great majority of Irish holdings became to be owned by Irish peasant proprietors, sons and grandsons of men who ‘often been treated with less respect than cattle’ .
To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.
Somerville, P., & Steele, A. (2002). 'Race', housing and social exclusion. London: Jessica Kinsglsy Publishers.
Gilman has stated in multiple papers that the main reason for her writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” was to shed light on her awful experience with this ‘rest cure’. However, she also managed to inject her own feminist agenda into the piece. Charlotte Perkins Gilman chose to include certain subtle, but alarming details regarding the narrator’s life as a representation of how women were treated at the time. She wants us to understand why the narrator ends up being driven to madness, or in her case, freedom. There are untold layers to this truly simple, short story just like there were many layers to Gilman
Such was the environment in which droves of Irish immigrants sought to better their lives and those of their children by fleeing their homeland with its disastrous potato famines, and economic, political and religious repression. There are today descendants of the Goodwin families living in the Pawtucket area. There is certainly every likelihood that living today in Tyrone are many distant cousins.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a deceptively simple story. It is easy to follow the thirteen pages of narrative and conclude the protagonist as insane. This is a fair judgement, after all no healthy minded individual becomes so caught up with "hideous" and "infuriating" wallpaper to lose sleep over it, much less lock herself in a room to tear the wallpaper down. To be able to imagine such things as "broken necks" and "bulbous eyes" in the wallpaper is understandable, irrational and erratic designs can form rational patterns in our minds, but to see a woman locked inside of the "bars" of the wallpaper and attempt to rescue her seems altogether crazy. Her fascination with the wallpaper does seem odd to us, but it easy to focus on the eccentricity of her interest with paper and lose sight of what the wallpaper institutes: her writing. It is her writing that keeps her sane, the wallpaper that makes her insane, and from these two very symbolic poles the short story rotates. Gilman's short story is not simply about a lonely woman's descent into madness, but is symbolic of previous and contemporary women writer's attempt to overcome the "madness" and bias of the established, male dominated literary society that surrounds them.
During a very feudalistic time in Irish society, poor Catholic farmers would rent plots from the rich protestant landowners. If the poor farmers couldn't pay rent to the middlemen they were harshly evicted. When evicted they couldn't grab any of their personal belongings they were literally forced out o...
...wn to 4,000 acres. The undertakers, mostly landowners from England and Wales, were bound by gain, to plant ninety families that would constitute the full gambit of the English ‘social pyramid’. They also undertook not to lease to Native Irish. Success fell far short of ambitions. The grants proved too enormous for on undertaker to supervise and much of the New English planters never materialised. As a consequence, and the willingness of the Irish tenancy to pay higher rents, most of the displaced native Irish returned to the land. This had the unforeseen modernising effect of placing the Gaelic Irish into the newly created English social structure. As a result of the vast military activity all over the island, huge areas of impenetrable terrain was opened up. This had the knock on effect of improving travel, communications and trade over the majority of the island.
The result from her moving away from the community’s views on women, labeled her as a mental patient, who supposedly hallucinates frequently. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story made to portray women’s oppression during the late 1800s or early 1900s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses metaphors and other techniques to enhance the expression of women’s hardships. Throughout the short story, Gilman delivers occurrences of a neutral standpoint of suppression, a realization, the understanding, and then the acceptance of the main issue. Through the selection of characters, setting, and point of view, “The Yellow Wallpaper” expresses the women’s
The Travellers, a minority community indigenous to Ireland, have existed on the margins of Irish society for centuries. They share common descent, and have distinct cultural practices - early marriage, desire to be mobile, a tradition of self-employment, and so on. They have distinct rituals of death and cleansing, and a language they only speak among their own. Travellers are not overtly conscious of a sense of group history. Concern with ancestry is an obsession of those who value permanence of place. Rather, the individual is defined by his/her place within the relationship network. They live in extended patriarchal families, prefer trailers, tend to nomadism interspersed with occasional house dwelling, and maintain a nomadic mindset even when settled; a house is considered only a stopping place between journeys, whether the stop lasts 20 days or 20 years! There are an estimated 21,000 Travellers currently living in the Republic of Ireland, over half of whom have no access to toilet facilities, electricity, refuse collection or piped water.
Four aboriginal people (Mark Sauls, Trevor Dennis, Roseanne Jack and Roderick Anderson) participated in a roadblock of a highway in British Columbia and hindered a nearby excavation. The excavation for the expansion of the Sun Peaks resort caused a dispute between the British Columbia government and the Neskonlith Indian Band. As a result, these aboriginals obstructed both lanes of the highway for hours holding up traffic and causing havoc. The RCMP then negotiated with the accused and the blockade was eventually removed after which two of the accused jumped onto the excavation site and lay down in front of an excavator, forcing it to stop. The accused were charged with intimidation from and mischief under the criminal code. Mark Sauls and his band members maintained that they had acted “with legal justification or excuse, and with color of right” if which true under Section 429 of the Criminal Code would give them the right to act as they did. It was their position that they honestly believed the highway and resort were on aboriginal land and they had the legal right not only to control the land but to eject trespassers from it. The trial judge however dismissed their defence of Color of rights with the ruling that the group did not have an honest mistaken belief of the law but rather disregarded it. As well, if their claims were true, the method in which they attempted to prove their point were extreme signifying a more political statement rather than honest belief. They were found guilty of the charges and three of the accused thus received a sentence of 90 days of imprisonment for blockading a road...
In this essay ‘poor’ shall be split into two separate definitions: vagrant and settled poor. Where vagrant poor are those who wander from parish to parish searching for work and settled poor are those who have a house. These two groups are quite distinct, as the settled poor vastly out numbers the vagrant poor and there lives were very different. As the settlement act and other acts, which shall be discussed, treated them differently, with the vagrant poor being shunned by society. This essay shall be finding out whether the lives of the poor changed for the best or simply stayed the same. The lives of the settled poor shall be examined in the first half of the essay and the vagrant poor in the later.