The Thrush

A two-century history of Irish Travellers, told through the lives of one family.

Richly illustrated with restored and colourised photographs, this book traces generations of an Irish Traveller family through poverty, movement, work, faith, war, discrimination, settlement and survival in a changing Ireland.

This is both a family history and a social history: a record of real people whose lives reveal the wider experience of Irish Travellers across more than two centuries of profound social, economic and cultural change.

Through family memory, documentary records and historical context, the book follows older patterns of movement, kinship, labour and community, as well as the pressures of modernisation, state intervention, settlement and social transformation.

At its centre are names, faces, places and memories that might otherwise be lost. Their stories show how national history was lived at family level: on roadsides, in camps, in towns, in graveyards, in institutions, in military service, and in the everyday struggle to survive, adapt and endure.

Written for relatives, descendants, local historians, social historians and anyone interested in Irish Traveller history, this volume is a tribute to those who came before and a record for those who come after.