I have always wondered about the “irish travellers” - you see stories on Dateline NBC or 20/20 every now and then about these huge extended families in places like North Carolina. They travel around the east coast and work as tradesmen, except when they are busy scamming homeowners for work never performed. I’ve also heard these families are incestuous and perform weird rituals that involve teenaged members of the family who will be married…i know this sounds highly random, so does anybody know about this?
I’ve seen some of the documentation on this from law enforcement agencies, and in some newspapers - they do exist, but I’m afraid I don’t have a web-site I can give for you.
The “travellers” are of Irish, Scottish, and English origins, and very close-knitted. They specialise in scams like cheap home-repairs, paint jobs, driveway sealing, and so on. They travel around in Canada and the U.S., doing the scams and moving on, so they are difficult to catch. Some branches of the different travellers have special lingos, believed to be descended from old British dialects (and no, I don’t mean rhyming slang - probably older than that - regional dialects) that they have kept alive, and only use amongst themselves.
The bit about wierd marriage rituals I’ve not seen, but they do appear to be very careful to marry within their clans, as part of their general secrecy.
…I do not know that much about these people
but I live about 45 min or so from their main compound in Murphy Village SC and have driven past these really HUGE houses for years before I had heard about the travellers.
They may have been “Irish” at some time in the past, but now are simply scamming duplicitious redneck trash,pulling home repair scams on the elderly or otherwise vulnerable.
I have a friend who worked a retail job in an Augusta, Ga. mall nearest to the travellers home. She says that you can see them coming a mile away,dressed to the 9’s, dripping w/ tacky jewelry and other sigifiers of conspicuous consumption,hair piled high, made up like lower Park Ave. hookers.
They seem to marry off the women (girls) at a very young age to cousins or other close relatives (ok,not that unusual here in the South…>LOL<…)
As I recall a group of them came very close to pulling of a very profitable scam against Disneyworld involving a “rape” within a resort hotel on the grounds. It fell apart when a dispute arose over splitting the take.
I think it was on 20-20 or something similar.
NBC’s Dateline has done stories on the travelers in the past. One story had a secret video of a beauty pageant with 7-10 year old girls dressed up like cheap hookers and flaunting themselves.
They had interviews with outsiders that had managed to marry into the group. They had left after years of seeing the scams and the young girls exploitation.
What would Brian Boitano do / If he was here right now /
He’d make a plan and he’d follow through / That’s what Brian Boitano would do.
Try meeting them in their natural environment
the Irish Republic- there they perform an even stranger ritual
They go door to door scamming the elderly while being given benefits by the government for being “unemployed”
Unemployable more like, even the homes the government gives them are taken apart and sold- boilers ovens and all
Weren’t “Gypsies” (such as any transient was likely to be labelled) traditionally involved in such scams? I had heard that home-repair-type scams was part of why they got their reputation for dishonesty.
In Switzerland, these travelling grifters also exist, and we call them “gypsies”. Not to assert that all of them are criminals, but the kind of cases you hear about would be, e.g. someone ringing the doorbell, and engaging a long conversation with the homeowner, while an accomplice comes in the back door and pilfers items from the house.
A recent cinematic treatment of this group of people (in the USA):
Traveller (1997), directed by Jack Green, starring Bill Paxton, Mark Wahlberg, Julianna Margulies. Not a great movie, but worth renting, especially if you’re interested in this nomadic lifestyle.
maybe this will bring it all together:
i have always heard of these people as “irish gypsies”-- it wasn’t until the 20/20 piece and that movie that i heard the term, “traveller.”
my father has presided over an irish gypsy funeral, and a college friend/social worker often had dealings with irish gypsy families (some mention was made of their doll-like appearance and its possible connection to inbreeding).
they are definitely gypsies, though. the main interviewee in the 20/20 piece explained how she could identify a fellow “traveller”-- she proceeded to speak in Romany, the language of traditional east european gypsies, and i specifically remember the sense of the sentence being, “are you Rom?”-- and “Rom” (pronounced w/a long “O”) translates to “Man” – what the gypsies call themselves.
Irish travellers aren’t Roma themselves, although they are pretty much the Irish equivalent, even down to having their own language. See the Irish Traveller FAQ.
thanx for the FAQ–
i read it, but it does not account for the usage of the word,“Rom,” (or “roma”) in the 20/20 piece; the faq says that they call themselves “pavee(?)”
is it possible that the paths of the irish gypsies and eastern euro. gypsies have crossed often enough to have Romany overtake the Traveller’s language?
I’d consider it extremely unlikely. First, because no other source seems to mention it; second, because immigration to Ireland is a relatively recent phenomenon, almost certainly not old enough for a foreign language to displace a native one (no smart comments about English displacing Gaelic please, you guys know what I mean).
suiyobi, are you absolutely SURE the 20/20 episode said the Irish travellers spoke Romany? I’m inclined to think you’re misremembering - but if not, I’d say the show was just wrong.