Hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection is a notifiable disease in Ireland, with national coverage of clinical and laboratory surveillance. In December 2020, a cluster of 11 HAV cases among the Irish Traveller community was detected. The outbreak investigation identified 61 total HAV cases from September 2020 to November 2021. Sequenced isolates were sub-genotype IA with identical genome sequence. Case-patients were predominantly aged under 18 (77%), hospitalised (46%) and lived on communal residential sites. Mass onsite HAV vaccination was employed following failure of initial ring vaccination to contain the outbreak. This is the largest outbreak of HAV described in Ireland, involving spillover to the UK and Netherlands. We recommend mass HAV vaccination and tailored communication for outbreak control in migratory subpopulations.

Irish Travellers are a traditionally nomadic ethnic minority indigenous to Ireland. Although recognized as an ethnic minority in adjacent jurisdictions, the Irish state persistently and explicitly denied recognizing Travellers’ separate ethnicity and pursued assimilationist policies designed to eradicate Travellers’ differences. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the state recognized the structural disadvantage and social stigma to which Travellers are subjected, naming them as a protected group in equality legislation, as well as laws addressing incitement to hatred. Through these interventions, the state afforded Travellers rights on the basis of their collective identity as Travellers, while continuing to deny their ethnicity. After sustained campaigning, Traveller ethnicity was recognized by the prime minister of Ireland in 2017. This article explores the reasoning behind, and legal significance of, that statement of recognition in Ireland.1 We outline the evidence in support of ethnic recognition as a prelude to addressing the question of whether recognition is likely to afford the community any additional rights. We conclude that this is unlikely given the protections afforded to the group prior to ethnic recognition, though we argue that recognition may give the community a firmer basis for arguing for the activation of these preexisting rights.

Objectives: To determine whether Irish Travellers are over-represented amongst transfers from prison to psychiatric hospital. If so, to determine whether this represents an excess over the proportion of Irish Travellers committed to prison.

Method: Irish Travellers admitted to the National Forensic Psychiatry service were identified from a case register over three years 1997-1999. New prison committals were sampled and interviewed as part of the routine committal screening to identify ethnicity.

Results: Irish Travellers accounted for 3.4% of forensic psychiatric admissions compared to 0.38% of the adult population. Travellers transferred from prison to psychiatric hospital had more learning disability and less severe mental illness than other groups, while black and other ethnic minorities had a higher proportion of severe mental illness. Travellers accounted for 6% (95% CI 3-11) of 154 male committals and 4% (95% CI 2-12) of 70 female committals. The estimated annualised prison committal rate was 2.8% (95% CI 2.4-3.3) of all adult male Travellers in Ireland and 1% for female Travellers (95% CI 0.8-1.3). Male Travellers had a relative risk of imprisonment compared to the settled community of 17.4 (95% CI 2.3-131.4), the relative risk for female Travellers was 12.9 (95% CI 1.7-96.7). Imprisoned Travellers had greater rates of drugs and alcohol problems than other prisoners (Relative risk 1.46, 95% C11.11-1.90).

Conclusion: There is gross over-representation of Travellers in forensic psychiatric admissions. This reflects the excess of Travellers amongst prison committals.

This paper examines relations between ‘tinkers’, or ‘Travellers’, and settled society in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. It argues that the racialisation and defamation of Travellers then reached new heights with the development of a rural fundamentalist nationalism which fused with Social Darwinism and caused Travellers to be treated as social anachronisms in an increasingly settled and sanitised society. This in turn meant that Travellers were located outside the moral and political structures of the Irish state and placed at the ‘hostile’ end of a continuum running from tradition to modernity. As a result of renewed modernisation through industrialisation in the 1970s through to the 1990s, new strategies of social closure have emerged which are causing Travellers to be located at the outer edges of Irish society. The paper finally suggests that the constant structuring and restructuring of economy and space in Ireland have fostered ‘fortress’ mentalities here. This is aggravating divisions, both at national and local level, between subaltern Travellers and hegemonic sectors in Irish society.