travellers

Page 2A : Sunday. Oct. 6,2002 : The Sun

SUN JOURNAL

Indiana incident has Irish rootsGroup: The. videotapeni'.i v . i u j i i u i beating herdaughter on a parking lotcurried across the seawhen it was revealed thatsho Is purl of n numttJicclan tolled ihe TnivdUin*.

By ANDREW RATNEH

The videotape of a womanbeating her daughter ir. aparking lot In Indiana did notreveal one large wound that theincident nopened

It's hundreds of yean old andnaif a world away.

Madelyne Oorman Toogoofl'strouble with the law made front -page headlines In Ireland as wellas (he United Slates becauseshe belongs to a nomadic clancalled the Irish Travellers -spelled with two Is It was thefirst time many In the UnitedStates had heard of the group.even though Its members set-tled in the United Slates In theIMQs to escape the potato fam-ine that ravaged Ireland.

The news also surprised manyIrish, who have wrestled withacceptance of the wanderingpeople for general tons but wereunaware the group had grown Inthe United States to 13,000. bysome estimates

"The woman's photo was onthe front page of the EveningHerald" In Dublin, says ThomasMcCann of the Irish TravdlenMovement, referring to a pictureof Toogood. "The general dis-cussion was the political climateIs not good toward Travellersnow and this story will make Iteven wor»e"

In northern Indiana, Toogoodfaces charges of felony battery ofher daughter. Martha, 4 The':-•;• .r.i.,\ woman was Identi-fied from a grainy videotapethat showed a child repeatedlybeing struck inside a vehicle.

The graphic security camerafootage fed media coverage andanalysis like wind In a brushflre

Some felt the videotape illus-trated parental abuse, otherspointed :» the child'* apparentphysical well-being afterwardand contended lhat the tmpesensationalized a common buttypically private breakdown- a

In a photo from IMS, Irtth Traveller motben and their children tit OB t cart on a street In County Garway. Irlth Travellers have beeitraced to nomadic workers who predate ths Celt*' arrival In Ireland in 400 BC. Aa estimated 15,000 Traveller! are in the United State*.

says Caoimhe McCabe of PaveePoint, a Traveller advocacygroup In Dublin.

Travellers by placing barricadesand boulders to block theircampsites. Subsidized housingwas built to Induce theTravellers to stay put, but rooUnever held 'It's just the way

Uonabty difficult, though: Only 5

lleved lo reach age 50.Campaigns lo era&e discrimi-

nation haven't succeeded. Lastsummer, the Vintners' Federa-tion of Ireland sought a ban onTravellers from pubs. A Catholicschool in County Gatway facedclosure when parents withdrew

for the Catholic priest who as-listed the immigrants 20 yearsago - Murphy Village. TravellerImmigrants who arrived In the

tended to assimilate into themainstream more quickly, someexperts soy.

"Even a lot of residents ofSouth Carolina don t realize

Uadeh/ne Gorman Too food tiuwith her attorney, StevenRosen. Toofood li to have apreliminary hearing tomorrow.

beginning* McCabe says. "Whydoes a prosperous culture haveto rule out a nomadic culture?They thought they could edu-cate them to Mop being whatthey were, but it was based on afalse Idea that Travellers wereJust settled people who hadfoiled at being settled people,'

Their cause became a civilrights Issue In Ireland over thepost 20 years, spawning equalitylaws and advocacy groups.

M c C a n n o f t h e I r i shTravellers Movement, an um-brella of about 70 local and re-gional Traveller groups, recalls a

ment of Traveller pupils. DallElreann. the Irish legislature,hu criminalized trespassing —a law aimed at the Travellers.The measure Is belnK challengedIn court.

Intermarriage, prosperity, so-cietal pressures to conform,technology — factors that oftenwither the distinct ways of vari-ous ethnic groups In the devel-opeterase wanderlust for Travellers

Their ancient trades havegiven way to newer door-to-doarenterprises, including: home re-pair, carpet sales and gardening

child on « shopping trip.The

the Celts' arrival In 400 BC.

stranger Toogood was addition-ally charged with giving false in-formation to an officer after theaddress she provided turned outto belong to a vacant dry-cleaning store. Her husband.John. 29. had given authoritiesthe some apparently false ad-dre&s. It was also listed on oneof several driver's licenses thecouple held.

Madelyne Toogood b to ap-pear tomorrow In an IndianaSuperior Court for a preliminaryhearing on the felony charge,says her attorney, Steven R.Rosen. She U free on $5.000bond. Martha is m foster core.

The Toogoods and their eth-nic group were described in var-ious accounts as "con men" and"grafters" who deal in 'Illusionand confusion"

The characterizations, broad-cast across the Atlantic, werem«t alternately with disgust and

Travellers reside In Ireland, lessthan 1 percent of the popula-tion. Another 10,000 live InGreat Britain. The group Is of-ten associated wtth other his-toric, itinerate cultures In Eu-rope — including English andScottish Travellers and Romanygypsies. But Irish Travellershave their own ways and dialect,an Engllsh-Quelic blend called'cant' or •Gammon.'

group of Native Americans.They had been invited to Irelandto help return a terribly lostbald eagle U> the United StatesFeeling that their culture alsohad been assailed and ridiculedby their countrymen, the NativeAmericans taw parallels withthe Travellers, he says.

•We lived in caravans withoutbasic faculties such as runningwater and tolleu." McCann ra-

the first In Ireland to adopt cel-lular phones — for a mobile peo-ple, a technology well worth the2.500-year wait. Horae carts andt«nts have been replaced by mo-bile homes and sport utility ve-hicles, such as the one MadelyneToogood was using

South Carolina police havefound It difficult to Identifyabout 3.000 Travellers who havesettled In lhat state because

scorned, feared and Ignored intheir homeland They initiallymade a life roaming from townto town by horse and cart, sell-ing and shaping metal. Their Unworknickname — "tinkers." from theIrish word (Inceard,

English kings beginning withHenry V sought to outlaw theiractivity After Ireland gained In-dependence In 1823. the new Re-public sought to 'take the

Traveller. There ore memoriesof good times, but you had theknowledge you did not have thesame facilities everyone elsetook for granted."

Sharon Bohn Gmelch, an an-thropology professor at Union

much of their income on trans-portation Is no longer so rare,

"When I started this 18 yearsago. 1 was told to look out fornice-looking pickups.* suite po-lice investigator Joe Livingstonsays. 'It used (o be I would see

enclaves all over America," Liv-ingston says.

"I was very surprised theywere here." says Seamus Deane.an Irish studies professor at No-tre Dame University, not farfrom where Toogood was ar-rested "It's astonishing the cov-erage this incident has receivedSome of them seem to make atot of money, driving Mercedesand BMWs. but most live miser-able existences"

Irish author Nuola O'Fanlainwas not describing the Toopiodcase when she wrote a columnabout the group's struggles InTTie Irish Time* several yearsago. but she might as well htve:

- A l m o s t t h e w h o l e o fTravellers' lives Is on view. Aman beats his wife in the streetand a hundred people .tee. Set-tled wife-beating happens be-h i n d c losed doors . TheTravellers line up outside theemployment exchange with bot-tles of wine in their hands, or sitIn their vans swigging from (hebottles. Meanwhile, thousandsand thousands of settled peopleare drinking In pubs or In frontof the telly or handing aroundthe sherries Many people neg-lect their children, but hardlyanyone knows Yet everyonesees the Travelling childrensniffing glut*. Everyone sees the

who has written books aboutthe culture, soys lhat unlike reli-gious groups such as Ihe Amish

out of faith, the Travellers' resis-tance to conformity to rooted Inan ethic of Independence and

was them Now It's like. aw.that's just another yuppie."

Although census figures arelacking for a people who refuseto stay put. Traveller communi-ties have been identified InTexas as well as South Carolina.

llfirhtiv In Harhnr'x

sitting all day in frunl of u card-board box....

"So the Travellers have no pri-vacy from us. They are 'other.'Their otherness is more thandisquieting: between us andthem there Is an abyss of under-standing, and in that abyss thenightmares about their natureswirl-