A close friend grew up in a traveling group but was sent to the United States as a child in the 90s. I recently asked what the deciding factor was when it came to her clan splitting up and was heartbroken by what came next. I only asked her because I am having such a hard time finding information on my own when it comes to the traveling groups. I would like to be better informed on the topic so if she wants to talk about her past I don’t have those types of possible painful questions to ask. If it helps at all we are in our early 30s so she was a child during the 90s. Anything I find online is in relation to the Catholics, Protestants, and larger ethnic groups. I understand traveler history is less documented but I’m hoping there is some resource I can find to become a better informed friend.
You are entirely right, at least in terms of higher academic scholarship, on all counts. There has been a surge in the past several years of addressing other ethnic and religious minorities in Northern Ireland during the Troubles (especially Jews and Hindus when it comes to religion and - I think really interestingly? - there are several great texts about the black experience both in the US with relation to the Irish conflict, and the black population of NI). Here at Queen's University Belfast, we did a forum earlier this year about religious/ethnic difference during the Troubles. But Travellers are so often left out of the literature entirely, sometimes for the reasons you stated and sometimes because there is legitimate dissent about how that community wants to talk about the effect the Troubles had on them/they had on the Troubles.
Remember, the Irish Republic did not recognize Travellers as a distinct ethnic group until the mid 2010s. The rationale and reasoning behind that is way, way outside my wheelhouse, though it is a very strange oversight in general. There are tons of amazing texts documenting the violence perpetrated during the Troubles, and many of them are about the victims in great detail. The CAIN archive - which is run by Ulster University and easily searchable online - is a good free one. McKittrick's Lost Lives is another, though harder to access without paying a fair amount. What makes the earlier point about recognition of Travellers as an ethnic group interesting is that those types of documents - which were pretty meticulously kept for such a messy and horrible time - are harder to parse, because it's not often a searchable term in archival spaces.
There are groups that one hundred percent are trying to track this stuff and who would be happy to hear from you with specific questions. The Donegal Travellers Project is based out of the Republic and one I weirdly stumbled across a few weeks ago for entirely unrelated reasons. I know this is not necessarily a perfect in-depth response, and there is a lot more to be said about the history of travellers in NI especially during the 90s, but I will admit that as being outside of my specific area of expertise. I did want to make sure DTP is a resource you are aware of, as well as anything with CAIN, whose site-lead is very good about responding to emails.
There’s a very helpful reading list in a comment here but if you’re interested in further (and not quite so male-dominated) reading suggestions you could look at the Writing the Troubles blog https://writingthetroublesweb.wordpress.com/about/ and https://womenalsoknowhistory.com/ : you can search this by keyword, e.g. ‘Troubles’, and find scholars and recent scholarship on the subject. It’ll be less introductory or overview-y than the works suggested elsewhere but there will be some new perspectives. Plenty of links to accessible newspaper articles too.