They were prepared to work long hours for low wages and very quickly ended up taking the bread out of the mouths of unqualified Irish labourers, which often led to bloody clashes. Not to mention the fact that after the Second World War they also gained the reputation of being gangsters, spreading organised crime.

Given that history repeats itself, now it is our turn to emigrate, for example to Italy. But as you will see, our beggars and gangsters are small fry compared with the Italian mob families, who have founded almost aristocratic dynasties…

But Italians are also defined as being lots of other wonderful things besides the label of Mafiosi… But not us, and that is due to historic defects, a failed present and a future that is always slipping away between our fingers… And so we have ended up defining ourselves by means of a negative: “We’re not all gypsies,” the same as the Italians used to have to define themselves by saying: “We’re not all Mafiosi.”

Nobody else can put you to shame; each person puts himself or herself to shame. In other words, when somebody begs or steals, it doesn’t put me to shame, but at worst it puts him to shame. But when an official representative of the Romanian State perpetrates an injustice against the citizens of his country, he puts us all to shame, because he is acting not in his own name, but in the name of us all.

And so it is today with the greatest shame committed in our name by the mayor of Baia Mare and those like him, not the Roma and non-Roma who commit all kinds of petty crimes or those who live in crushing poverty…

If he had not discriminated against them, if he had not built the wall, if he had not forcibly evicted hundreds of people, if he had not moved them into a lethal disused laboratory, putting their lives at risk, then nobody would be pointing the finger at Baia Mare…

And there is no shame greater shame than to pretend you don’t see the injustices to which your fellow men are subjected…