As a followup to the post above about Irish Travellers in the news, if you are looking for serious research on the Irish Travellers, we found these:

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, June 1, 2002, contains a book review of Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture by Jane Helleiner, 274 pp., bibliogr. London, Toronto: Univ. Toronto Press, 2000.

"Helleiner approaches the subject of Irish Travellers from the angle of political economy, paying due respect to the changing historical context through the twentieth century. She confronts and challenges the tired, pervasive assertions, repeated by roving journalists such as Fonseca, that a people with a semi-nomadic past, if not present, and with non-literate traditions, have neither history nor a sense of it...."

"....In some instances, the Travellers have been valued as ancient carriers of Celtic traditions. The dominant society saw them as survivals of the authentic Irish. But the value of Travellers as indigenous is ambiguous; and sometimes viewed as mere dropouts, Travellers faced plans for enforced assimilation, regardless of their own wishes. The Travellers have adopted different strategies to retain some self-determination. Helleiner has scrupulously examined a range of historical archives and local records and traced the shifting interactions between Travellers and the dominant society, detailing how Travellers select local non-Traveller values in specific contexts."

"Travellers, Gypsies, or Roma are not and cannot exist as hermetically sealed minorities. They engage on a daily basis with different members of the non-Gypsy populations. As an anthropologist, Helleiner has engaged in longterm fieldwork. This included co-residence and/or participant observation with Travellers. She attended public meetings and other arenas for interaction between Traveller and non-Traveller, She spent months with numbers of individuals and family clusters, thus gaining some trust. She spoke and understood the Travellers' language(s) and shifting vocabularies. "

"Helleiner provides examples of how some non-Traveller cursory texts provided Irish governmental justification for assimilation policies, still powerful today. Travellers have hitherto been labelled as part of a dysfunctional and dying subculture of poverty, but, against this, Helleiner's scrupulous examination of archival sources, combined with her own ethnography, demonstrates considerable continuities in Traveller practices. There are wonderful accounts of work patterns, many of which are overlooked or undervalued by the dominant society. The Travellers' ever-ingenious role in recycling brings yet new surprises."

"This outstanding anthropological monograph instructs us in similarities and differences among Travellers and groups known as Gypsies or Roma beyond regional and national borders. It supersedes all previous work on Irish Travellers and should be a standard text in the field."

Another serious work on the Irish Travellers is Ethnicity and history: the Irish traveller in Irish writing, by Mary Burke of Queen's University Belfast.

[all sources are available on lexis-nexis.]