Woman caught on video in US beating child found to be member of Irish nomadic group

US: A woman caught on videotape beating her child in a department store car-park has been identified as a member of a 10,000…

US: A woman caught on videotape beating her child in a department store car-park has been identified as a member of a 10,000-strong nomadic group in the US known as the Irish Travellers.

The videotape became a national sensation in the US after it was shown repeatedly on television. The woman, Ms Madelyne Gorman Toogood (25), was due to appear in an Indiana court yesterday charged with felony battery to a child, which carries a three-year prison sentence. Her daughter has been placed in foster care.

Pictured as a blonde on the surveillance video taken outside a department store in Mishawaka, Indiana, on September 13th, Ms Toogood avoided arrest for a week by dyeing her hair black.

She has now come forward to admit that she hit her four-year-old daughter, Martha, on the head and back and pulled her hair, while insisting that she did not punch her. She said she did it because she was having a bad day.

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"Martha didn't deserve what she got," Ms Toogood said. "I just lost my temper." She said she belonged to a group known as the Irish Travellers which she said often experienced discrimination in stores. Members of the group, which numbers about 10,000 according to the Irish Traveller Movement website, are descendants of refugees from the 19th-century potato famine.

Most of the men make their living in home-improvement and business-repair work, such as paving, painting and roofing.

Mr Joe Livingston, a senior agent with the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division, who has investigated cases concerning Travellers over 18 years, said Ms Toogood belonged to a sub-clan of the Irish Travellers known as the Greenhorn Carrolls, who are concentrated in the Texas communities of Fort Worth and White Settlement.

"In Texas, they are called the Greenhorn Carrolls," he said. "The South Carolina Travellers are known as the Georgia Boys. In Memphis, they are known as the Mississippi Travellers." Speaking by telephone from Columbia, South Carolina, Mr Livingston said that the Irish Travellers were devout Catholics and spoke their own language, known as Shelta, or Cant, partly based on Gaelic.

The biggest single concentration of about 3,000 Irish Travellers live in the town of Belvedere in South Carolina, but travel around 80 per cent of the time, Mr Livingston said.

Belvedere is known as Murphy's Town after a Father Murphy who helped them settle there. They come home annually for the Masters Golf Tournament in nearby Augusta where they bet on the outcome, Mr Livingston said.

"The Irish Travellers do caulking and roof work, and paint barns," he said. "Some of them are good business people, but a lot take advantage of elderly people."

Mr Livingston said there were also English Travellers in the US, who went round doing big construction jobs with heavy equipment, and Scottish Travellers who worked on waterproofing and house repairs.

Before the incident, Ms Toogood and her husband, John, a contractor, had been living in Mishawaka for about six months. They have three children under the age of seven.

In the videotape Ms Toogood is shown standing by the rear door of the vehicle with her back to the camera, hitting and shaking her daughter on the back seat.

Authorities said Ms Toogood had been in the nearby Kohl's department store where she was denied a cash refund for two pairs of jeans. Her lawyer, Mr Steven Rosen, said he believed Ms Toogood hit her daughter because Martha misbehaved in the shop. He said her extended family members and friends told him the child was fine and had been examined by a doctor.

Ms Toogood said she was "horrified" when she saw the incident on videotape.

The Greenhorn Carrolls made news in January 2000 when five of their young male members were killed in a crash on Interstate 30 in Fort Worth. The accident shocked authorities when they discovered that none of the boys was older than 14 and four were carrying false driving licences misrepresenting their ages.