Tinker

Abstract: Travellers have been marginalized as "lower caste" because of their cultural differences from majority Ireland, a racialization denoted by the pejorative term "tinker." This racialization is entwined with the importation of that term into Anglophone Ireland in the early nineteenth century. In post-Reformation northern European Protestant culture, "tynkers" were condemned as the inverse of Western and Christian norms. As English spread, tinker unevenly but gradually replaced Irish-language terms used for the peripatetic that did not carry the negative connotations of the imported word. Therefore, in tracing any earlier presence in Ireland of those so named, the word tinker is a red herring. This essay will unfold how the racial and cultural politics of the classification of disparate European peripatetic communities since the Reformation are central to how the word tinker became attached to the community now known as Travellers.