This is “Matt”. He didn’t want anyone to see his face for obvious reasons. He also said he’d taken a load of photos of the campsite on his phone but left it out there. Which sucks.
In any community, you’re always going to have a small group of selfish, amoral dickheads who tarnish the group name. Like the hyper-violent Polish football louts who make it impossible to go to a game, or Jennifer Lopez, who made the entire world despise every single female R&B artist. Despite the more recent pro-gypsy media coverage, there are still those rotten apples within the UK’s Irish traveller community who ruin it for the good folk by abducting non-travellers, trafficking them through Europe and then forcing them to carry out slave-wage manual labour while living in appalling conditions.
Through my flatmate’s brother, I met “Matt” (not his real name, by the way, but I don’t want him getting beaten up for talking to me). Matt was conned into going to Europe with a bunch of Irish travellers to coerce pensioners out of thousands of pounds, in return for a measly wage and near-starvation. They might be helping young men “see the world”, but it’s people like them that apparently justify the media’s overt hatred of travellers and make it OK for teenagers to throw eggs at their caravans.
Read out interview with “Matt” here.
