The videotape of a woman beating her daughter in a parking lot in Indiana did not reveal one large wound that the incident reopened.
It's hundreds of years old and half a world away.
Madelyne Gorman Toogood's trouble with the law made front-page headlines in Ireland as well as the United States because she belongs to a nomadic clan called the Irish Travellers - spelled with two l's. It was the first time many in the United States had heard of the group, even though its members settled in the United States in the 1840s to escape the potato famine that ravaged Ireland.
The news also surprised many Irish, who have wrestled with acceptance of the wandering people for generations but were unaware the group had grown in the United States to 15,000, by some estimates.
"The woman's photo was on the front page of the Evening Herald" in Dublin, says Thomas McCann of the Irish Travellers Movement, referring to a picture of Toogood. "The general discussion was the political climate is not good toward Travellers now and this story will make it even worse."
In northern Indiana, Toogood faces charges of felony battery of her daughter, Martha, 4. The 25-year-old woman was identified from a grainy videotape that showed a child repeatedly being struck inside a vehicle.
The graphic security camera footage fed media coverage and analysis like wind in a brushfire.
Some felt the videotape illustrated parental abuse. Others pointed to the child's apparent physical well-being afterward and contended that the tape sensationalized a common but typically private breakdown: a parent losing control with a child on a shopping trip.
The strange story became stranger: Toogood was additionally charged with giving false information to an officer after the address she provided turned out to belong to a vacant dry-cleaning store. Her husband, John, 29, had given authorities the same apparently false address. It was also listed on one of several driver's licenses the couple held.
Madelyne Toogood is to appear tomorrow in an Indiana Superior Court for a preliminary hearing on the felony charge, says her attorney, Steven R. Rosen. She is free on $5,000 bond. Martha is in foster care.
The Toogoods and their ethnic group were described in various accounts as "con men" and "grifters" who deal in "illusion and confusion."
The characterizations, broadcast across the Atlantic, were met alternately with disgust and agreement in Ireland where the Travellers have been traced to nomadic workers who predate the Celts' arrival in 400 BC.
An estimated 30,000 Irish Travellers reside in Ireland, less than 1 percent of the population. Another 10,000 live in Great Britain. The group is often associated with other historic, itinerate cultures in Europe - including English and Scottish Travellers and Romany gypsies. But Irish Travellers have their own ways and dialect, an English-Gaelic blend called "cant" or "Gammon."
Irish Travellers have been scorned, feared and ignored in their homeland. They initially made a life roaming from town to town by horse and cart, selling and shaping metal. Their tin work became the source of a nickname - "tinkers," from the Irish word tinceard.
English kings beginning with Henry V sought to outlaw their activity. After Ireland gained independence in 1922, the new Republic sought to "take the Traveller out of the Travellers," says Caoimhe McCabe of Pavee Point, a Traveller advocacy group in Dublin.
Towns sought to thwart Travellers by placing barricades and boulders to block their campsites. Subsidized housing was built to induce the Travellers to stay put, but roots never held. "It's just the way they have always been since the beginning," McCabe says. "Why does a prosperous culture have to rule out a nomadic culture? They thought they could educate them to stop being what they were, but it was based on a false idea that Travellers were just settled people who had failed at being settled people."
Their cause became a civil rights issue in Ireland over the past 20 years, spawning equality laws and advocacy groups.
McCann of the Irish Travellers Movement, an umbrella of about 70 local and regional Traveller groups, recalls a meeting several years ago with a group of Native Americans. They had been invited to Ireland to help return a terribly lost bald eagle to the United States. Feeling that their culture also had been assailed and ridiculed by their countrymen, the Native Americans saw parallels with the Travellers, he says.
"We lived in caravans without basic facilities such as running water and toilets," McCann recalls of his upbringing as a Traveller. "There are memories of good times, but you had the knowledge you did not have the same facilities everyone else took for granted."
Sharon Bohn Gmelch, an anthropology professor at Union College in upstate New York who has written books about the culture, says that unlike religious groups such as the Amish who deny modern conveniences out of faith, the Travellers' resistance to conformity is rooted in an ethic of independence and adventure. The life is unquestionably difficult, though: Only 5 percent of Travellers are believed to reach age 50.
Campaigns to erase discrimination haven't succeeded. Last summer, the Vintners' Federation of Ireland sought a ban on Travellers from pubs. A Catholic school in County Galway faced closure when parents withdrew their children after the enrollment of Traveller pupils. Dail Eireann, the Irish legislature, has criminalized trespassing - a law aimed at the Travellers. The measure is being challenged in court.
Intermarriage, prosperity, societal pressures to conform, technology - factors that often wither the distinct ways of various ethnic groups in the developed world - have failed to erase wanderlust for Travellers.
Their ancient trades have given way to newer door-to-door enterprises, including home repair, carpet sales and gardening. The group is said to be among the first in Ireland to adopt cellular phones - for a mobile people, a technology well worth the 2,500-year wait. Horse carts and tents have been replaced by mobile homes and sport utility vehicles, such as the one Madelyne Toogood was using.
South Carolina police have found it difficult to identify about 3,000 Travellers who have settled in that state because their preference for spending much of their income on transportation is no longer so rare.
"When I started this 18 years ago, I was told to look out for nice-looking pickups," state police investigator Joe Livingston says. "It used to be I would see three nice pickups and I knew it was them. Now it's like, aw, that's just another yuppie."
Although census figures are lacking for a people who refuse to stay put, Traveller communities have been identified in Texas as well as South Carolina, where one campsite is named for the Catholic priest who assisted the immigrants 20 years ago - Murphy Village. Traveller immigrants who arrived in the more urbanized Northeast tended to assimilate into the mainstream more quickly, some experts say.
"Even a lot of residents of South Carolina don't realize they're here, but there are little enclaves all over America," Livingston says.
"I was very surprised they were here," says Seamus Deane, an Irish studies professor at Notre Dame University, not far from where Toogood was arrested. "It's astonishing the coverage this incident has received. Some of them seem to make a lot of money, driving Mercedes and BMWs, but most live miserable existences."
Irish author Nuala O'Faolain was not describing the Toogood case when she wrote a column about the group's struggles in The Irish Times several years ago, but she might as well have:
"Almost the whole of Travellers' lives is on view. A man beats his wife in the street and a hundred people see. Settled wife-beating happens behind closed doors. The Travellers line up outside the employment exchange with bottles of wine in their hands, or sit in their vans swigging from the bottles. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of settled people are drinking in pubs or in front of the telly or handing around the sherries. Many people neglect their children, but hardly anyone knows. Yet everyone sees the Travelling children sniffing glue. Everyone sees the women with sunburnt babies sitting all day in front of a cardboard box. ...
"So the Travellers have no privacy from us. They are 'other.' Their otherness is more than disquieting: between us and them there is an abyss of understanding, and in that abyss the nightmares about their nature swirl."