'I've spent my life passionate about justice and equality' – Irish Traveller Trish Reilly

Irish Traveller singer/songwriter Trish Reilly - who was seized from her family by social services when she was a child - talks to the Travellers Times Liza Mortimer about what drives her music and her activism.

“I hadn't seen the inside of a house until I was eight years of age, because when I was young we travelled,” says Trish Reilly.  “In our language, Cant, we would call it a nabus.  And I didn't know the outside world. This is 1981 I'm talking about, when things were very different for Travellers, and we'd been used to living on the roads up until this point.”

Trish Reilly is an Irish Traveller and a singer/songwriter and musician. Her music spans many genres and often moves beyond traditional folk music – although Trish sings and plays that as well and comes from a long line of traditional Irish Traveller folk singers. Trish was seized from her family at a young age and was brought up in a series of children’s homes by the Irish social services. It wasn’t until she was an adult that Trish finally managed to reconnect with her mum, dad and wider family.

“My four sisters and I were taken one day, just like that, by what we used to call the cruelty man - the officials who would come out and take children - and they just whipped us away and gave us no warning and we were brought to live in a very large group home,” says Trish.

“It was a time when the industrial schools (children’s workhouses) were changing into larger group homes, and I stayed there for 10 years and I was told years later that they (the government) were sorry if it was today, it wouldn't have happened,” explains Trish. 

“There was no reason for it other than I was a traveller. I've spent my life passionate about justice for everyone, justice for everybody, equality for everyone.” 

Broken Lines, which Trish performed at the 2019 Ireland Traveller Pride event, is one of her songs which deals directly with forced assimilation by the state, which Trish says was a deliberate policy by the Irish government following their publication in 1963 of an infamous report on itinerancy and Irish Travellers – and how to ‘solve’ that ‘problem’ in Irish society.

“In Broken Lines, that's the first line of the song - the final solution in 1963 to get rid of the problem of itinerancy,” says Trish, explaining that one of the strategies in the report was to take Traveller children from their families and put them into industrial schools and children’s homes as a way of diluting and eventually eradicating Irish Traveller culture.

“I was told I was nothing but a dirty tinker and I should be grateful to be there,” Trish says of her time incarcerated in the children’s homes. “I was a project.  Their mission was to get me and carve me and shape me and mould me, and I couldn't talk my own language. They took my accent away from me. They forced me into what they thought was the norm”.

“There was no reason for it other than I was a Traveller. I've spent my life passionate about justice for everybody, equality for everyone.” 

Interview by Liza Mortimer, write up by Mike Doherty

(Photograph: Trish Reilly performs at the 2024 Atchin Tan, Glastonbury Festival © Eszter Halasi)