Abstract
As Melissa Sihra has summarised, '[a]s Ireland's ethnic minority with a current population of approximately 40,000 the Travelling People have endured discrimination on the margins of society for at least one millennium,' adding that becoming a Traveller is impossible since it is a 'birthright'. 1 In her breakthrough play By the Bog of Cats... (1998), Marina Carr has indeed built the tension between Hester Swane, the Traveller who has been abandoned by her people, and the settled community of the 1990s rural Irish midlands on the premise that Traveller identity is always inherited. Hester is proud to claim her heritage and, at the same time, this is used against her by others when convenient.
While Hester's wandering on the bog at night, periods of drinking, and her ability to see the supernatural might have been passed down to her by her mother, tying into some settled stereotypes about Travellers, Hester lacks all that Travellers themselves traditionally consider typical for their culture-starting with the fact that her derelict caravan has always been stationary. Hester's precarious position towards the father of her child should also be compared to the tradition among Travellers to marry young and, until recently, as an arranged match.
What is mostly a transposition of Euripides's Medea-Jason/Carthage has decided to leave the mother of his children (Medea/Hester) for a local woman who will allow him to climb the social ladder, thus forcing his former partner into exile-can also be tied to the emphasis on marriage typical in Traveller culture. Growing up in a settled community, rather than a Traveller community, Hester constructs her minority identity largely based on her and others' memories of her mother, as well as existing settled stereotypes.
Despite her obvious disadvantages, many in the local community attribute Hester's difficult situation simply to her Traveller identity. This experience can be tied to the position of Travellers in the modern Irish state, where the politics of settling down 'itinerant' Irish citizens has deprived many of their traditional way of living-along with the rapidly changing economy-while the mental concept that Travellers are not fully Irish has been much more reluctant to go.
Building on Victor Merriman's essay "'Poetry shite': Towards a Postcolonial Reading of Portia Coughlan and Hester Swane", 2 this paper explores the status of Irish Travellers in relation to the concept of citizenship in By the Bog of Cats...., as well as contrasting the play to two autobiographical works by Irish Traveller women, the activist Nan Joyce's 1985 Traveller 3 and Rosaleen McDonagh's new book Unsettled 4 (2021). 1 Melissa Sihra, Marina Carr: Pastures of the Unknown (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 130-1. 2 Victor Merriman, "'Poetry shite': Towards a Postcolonial Reading of Portia Coughlan and Hester Swane", in The Theatre of Marina Carr: Before Rules was Made, ed. Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan (Bray: Carysfort Press, 2003). 3 Nan Joyce: Traveller: An Autobiography by Nan Joyce, ed.
Anna Farmar (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1985). 4 Rosaleen McDonagh, Unsettled (Dublin: Skein Press, 2021).