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Comment by jbrennan | Hacker News Reader

Ireland springs to mind, and in fact has strong ties to Indigenous nations in the Americas for their similar struggles

That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world.

We do have our own indigenous minority who are treated badly by society - Irish travellers. There's a lot of racism in Irish society towards them, and we could do with looking at how other countries treat minorities, indigenous or not, and recognize for all that we like to harp on about our own poor treatment in history, we are doing exactly the same here towards travellers.

It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.

I don't think the semantics of the word indigenous are the important thing here, although I will say that officially, according to the Irish government, Irish travellers are an indigenous minority and attempts to discredit this are usually a thinly disguised attempt to discredit the credibility of the Irish travellers as a distinct ethnic minority - or, to put it another way, it's one of the more common ways that Irish people are racist towards travellers.

Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.

Calling them “indigenous” is a tactic to give greater moral weight to their political positions. While those positions may be meritorious, that doesn’t justify false characterizations in their service. Irish Travelers are ethnically no different than other Irish, nor does their presence in the country predate that of other Irish.

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