Child beater puts spotlight on America's Irish travellers
The tearful testimonial Madelyne Gorman Toogood gave in front of glaring TV cameras after she was caught on surveillance cameras beating her daughter was starkly uncharacteristic of the reclusive, media-shy Irish Travellers culture to which she belongs, experts say.
Toogood, who was caught beating her four-year-old daughter, Martha, in an Indiana department store car park, said she is a member of the clannish, nomadic culture of Irish descendants, most of whom came to the United States as refugees during the potato famine in the 1840s.
“By nature, they’re very reclusive people,” said Joe Livingston, a South Carolina state investigator who has been tracking Travellers for nearly two decades. “They tend to shy away from publicity.”
Some law enforcement experts who have studied the culture paint it as a secret society, fond of material wealth evidenced by gaudy jewellery and new cars.
Police often associate Travellers with scams involving fraudulent home repair that target the elderly.
They tend to use aliases, carry bogus identification cards, and avoid contact with non-Travellers, whom they call “country folk,” authorities said.
But professors and academics said the reclusiveness is a defence mechanism against stereotypes and the ancient persecution that has haunted nomadic peoples throughout history.
Travellers, who may be Irish, English or Scottish, have no more criminals among them than any other ethnic culture, experts said.
“If there were, they could not sustain their living,” said Larry Otway, who began studying Irish Travellers in 1977 and has worked as a paralegal and adviser on court cases involving Scottish travellers.
What the clans in the culture do share, Otway said, is a nomadic lifestyle, a language called Scelta with roots in Gaelic and Romany, an almost “pathologic” devotion to Catholicism, and an anti-bureaucratic form of self government that he describes as a “consensus democracy.”
The largest Traveller settlement is a group of 3,000 in Murphy Village, South Carolina, experts said.
Toogood is believed to belong to the Greenhorn Carrolls, a Traveller group in the Fort Worth area.
Estimates of the US Traveller population vary from 20,000 to 100,000.
Ian Hancock, a professor at the University of Texas who wrote the Irish Travellers entry for the Encyclopedia of the South, said a distraught Toogood called him seeking advice.
“She was scared to turn herself in because she knows very well how the police feel about the Irish Travellers,” said Hancock, who has a reputation as a sympathiser of the group. “She didn’t think she’d get a fair shake and she knew she’d been rough with the child.”
Toogood, who also has two young sons, remains free on £3,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in court on October 7. If convicted, she faces up to three years in prison.
She was scheduled to have a 90 minute supervised meeting with her daughter on Tuesday but the child, who is in foster care, was sick. A lawyer for the state said Toogood would be allowed to see Martha today if the girl has recovered from the flu.
Hancock and other academics said they believe Toogood’s case has been sensationalised by the media because of her ethnicity.
“As bad as what she did, and it’s inexcusable, I still think there’s an awful lot of profiling going on,” Hancock said. “Very much is being made of her ethnic background. If she were German American or Italian American, would that even be an issue?”
