It was while speaking about civil rights in a Leitrim pub that I first became aware of the significance of aberrant ashtrays.

I had seen the ashtrays on the ledges around the walls as I'd addressed a decent-sized audience about the Sixties anti-war movement, Martin Luther King, Jan Palach, the Bogside, etc.

Afterwards, I asked the organisers: how come the ashtrays?

"It's for when the knackers are in town." My perplexed response prompted fuller explanation.

Since the smoking ban, customers had become used to stepping outside for a cigarette. But this made for problems when knackers were around.

They'd "nip in before you'd know it" and, once in, "threaten you with the law if you didn't serve them."

So, any time word spread that the knackers were coming, doors were barred and smoking permitted inside.

None of the half-dozen included in the company seemed at all fazed at the tenor and drift of the conversation.

Racism against Travellers is so deep-rooted it isn't felt as racism at all. For the most part, it isn't felt any more than we feel ourselves breathing.

Attitudes towards Travellers are shouted out from headlines, which, if applied to another group, would be accounted as shocking.

Take a look at the website http://www.jewify.org. Enter the url of any news item containing the words 'Gypsy' or 'Traveller' and the site will substitute Jew.

Here's a selection of recent results:

• 'Bill for evicting just 90 Jewish families from UK's biggest illegal site could hit £18m';

• 'Italy starts controversial plan to fingerprint Jews';

• 'Jews lose driving licences for allegedly paying people to pass tests for them.';

• 'Sarkozy orders all Jews expelled from France';

• "I'm not a Jew" says BGT star Michael Collings';

• 'Essex Jews facing eviction threaten Big Fat Jew War on the authorities'; and

• 'Anger at Jewish invasion'.

The parallel between the persecution of Travellers and of Jews is appropriate; the Nazis targeted each on the same basis. Half-a-million Gypsies perished in the Holocaust - the culmination of centuries of oppression.

The Roma, originally from northern India, were first called 'Gypsies' because it was believed that had come from Egypt. The Egyptians Act of 1530 legalised the expulsion from England of the 'outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians'. In 1547, Edward VI imposed a law allowing Gypsies to be rounded up, branded and enslaved.

We could trace the line of hatred down through the decades, all the way to Dale Farm. The same thread runs through wider European history.

Roma and Travellers are distinct ethnic groups. Both are characterised by nomadism. More relevantly, they share a distinct space in the social hierarchy: at the bottom.

The databases of the Gypsy Roma Traveller all-party Westminster group, of the Irish Traveller Movement, the Gypsy Council etc, bulge with statistics of extreme disadvantage.

Gypsies and Travellers in the UK live, on average, 10 years less than settled people. Gypsy and Traveller mothers are 20 times more likely than their settled sisters to see a child die before reaching five. Suicide rates among Irish Traveller men are 10 times higher than among settled men.

Settled residents around Dale Farm who want the Travellers out don't see themselves as racists. They are out only to preserve their own area and their own way of life, a number told interviewers over the weekend. But isn't this what's always said?

'I am not anti-black, anti-Moslem, anti-Catholic, Protestant or Jew, but these particular blacks /Moslems/Catholics/Protestants /Jews are threatening my neighbourhood and my way of life.'

Hardly anyone ever says: 'I want these people away from me because I hate them for what they are. Most Travellers' deaths from dire conditions go unrecorded. But I recall Linda Doyle, who died aged five from exposure in a tent at a camp at Cherry Orchard in Dublin in 1964.

Ciaran McKeown, later a leader of the Peace People, and myself were among an ad-hoc student group which picketed the Bord Failte office in Castle Street in Belfast in protest after contacting the spokesman for the Cherry Orchard camp, an Englishman called Grattan Puxon.

I heard Grattan again yesterday morning, on RTE radio, leading Dale Farm families in a chorus of 'We Shall Not Be Moved.'

Sometimes today, whether in Leitrim pubs or marble parliaments, we talk of how far we have come since we first sang that anthem. But not everyone has been brought along.

The Guardian quoted one Dale Farm resident yesterday: "We are such a proud people. It's hard for us to say we need help.

"But, for the love of God, we need help now."