Norah Casey has long admired Traveller’s business skills and entrepreneurial drive. In this new series Norah is mentoring four young Traveller women in the world of business. She is giving them access and insights, developing their skills and hopefully helping them succeed in their new business ventures.
The women Norah has picked to work with have very different skills yet all have bags of determination and drive. Ann-Rose spends as much time as she can altering and up styling clothes for Traveller girls and women at home on her kitchen table. Tracie is a journalist who works for The Voice of the Traveller magazine. Leanne studied Fine Art in The Crawford College or Art and Design in Cork (only 1% of Travellers go on third level education). And Christine has a qualification in gel and acrylic nails and wants to set up a mobile glamour unit.
Norah is determined to help all these young women set up their own businesses, that will function and operate both within, and even more challengingly, outside their own community. Her ambition is great for them, but so too is her business knowledge, conviction and contact list!
Norah’s Traveller Academy is groundbreaking Irish television, where we are genuinely seeing into the lives of these young ambitious Traveller women and their journey to creating viable businesses in a country where they still experience prejudice and exclusion.
Episode 2
Episode 2 features Ann-Rose Mongan from Blanchardstown.
Ann-Rose would like to turn her “up-styling/blinging” into a professional business. Self taught, Ann-Rose makes and alters clothing for herself and her sisters. She would love to be a designer and to make or up-style her own creations. At the moment she takes orders from Travellers who provide ready-made clothes which she “blings” by buying diamonds and accessories online in bulk and then painstakingly hand gluing them onto the garments. She has been asked to ‘bling’ up everything from christening shoes to prams and baby bottles.
Norah’s Traveller Academy continues on Thursday, 22nd, January, 9pm on RTÉ2