Source: Times
At the end of a potholed road lies the village to which a hundred Romanians are returning after fleeing racist attacks in Belfast and where their fear will soon turn to despair.
Twenty hours of journey time separate Belfast, via Dublin and Budapest, from Batar but, surveying the medieval conditions in which the Roma live here, one might do better to take as a measure of distance not years, nor even decades, but centuries.
On the farthermost margins of the European Union a man’s legs and arms were smeared with dirt as he toiled to make bricks from straw and mud to build another room on his home. It was, he said, to provide somewhere to sleep for the dozens of naked children — some of them malnourished, all of them filthy — who were running and swooping gleefully through the scattered rubbish.
Elderly couples sat on upturned buckets and tired old horses pulled carts while older children rode scrap-salvaged bicycles. No sanitation, a rudimentary electricity supply and the background hum of hunger and hopelessness completed the picture.
