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28th Mar 2024

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Glasgow: Ahead on Roma inclusion

  • Roma accordionist in Glasgow (Photo: Valentina Pop)

Compared to Edinburgh with its pretty castles and open golf courses, Glasgow is a whole different story. Spread out along the river Clyde, Scotland's second largest city has a distinctly working-class feel to it.

In the southern area of Govanhill, you can shop for fruit in Arab shops, listen to Roma accordions on the street and get your car washed in a Pakistani-run garage. Over 50 languages are spoken in the roughly 15,000 strong community. Some 3,500 of its residents are Roma, mostly from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but increasingly also from Romania.

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  • Social housing in Govanhill (Photo: Valentina Pop)

It is a melting pot. But sometimes it "feels like a doomed place for vulnerable people, exposing them to exploitation," says Katarina Zborovianova, a community worker who tells of women sorting potatoes for 12 hours at a time, leaving their hands numb and swollen.

Zborovianova, a Slovak national who works for a local charity in Glasgow, the Crossroads Youth and Community Association, says that economic exploitation underpinned the first mass arrivals of Czech and Slovak Roma in Govanhill, back in 2005.

"They paid overpriced rents and were taken to factories by bus for which they also had to pay. They were charged even for uniforms. So there was a vicious circle of dependence, because they were not earning enough and had all these debts accumulating," Zborovianova says.

RomaNet project twinning ten EU cities

In the meantime, however, the situation has improved. Over 40 organisations work with the local community in Govanhill to provide counselling, English courses, and training so that people can find jobs, send their kids to school and integrate.

Glasgow is now held up as an example for how to integrate Roma communities. It is part of the RomaNet project, which twins ten EU cities also working on integrating Europe's largest minority.

"There are lots of activities in Govanhill, different organisations have different ways of interacting, but local authorities are now connected to these grassroots activities through RomaNet," says Ann Hyde, the lead expert for the project.

She admits that it will "take a long time" to change mentalities and get all the recommendations implemented by local authorities.

But she notes that the network helps because it shows municipalities in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic how inclusive policies work in Spanish or Scottish cities.

Other community workers, however, grumble that more money should be allowed to trickle down to where it is most needed rather than being spent on local officials travelling to meetings to exchange good practices.

"There are a lot of good projects at local level, charities and organisations do cooperate. But this has nothing to do with RomaNet," says Eva Kourova, a Roma youth project leader for the West of Scotland Regional Equality Council.

Her colleague from Slovakia, Marcela Adamova, who founded Friends of Romano Lav (Roma Voice), a charity fighting discrimination, added that participation in RomaNet meetings was restricted to Glasgow council members, while local officials from other countries did bring along community workers.

They both agreed, however, that life for Roma in Glasgow is better than in the villages back home, where local authorities have been known to build walls and put Roma children in schools for mentally disabled.

This story was originally published in EUobserver's 2014 Regions & Cities Magazine.

Click here to read previous editions of our Regions & Cities magazine.

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