TV3?s Paul Connolly unearths US traveller community allowing girls as young as 9 to marry.

TV3 GROUP RELEASE 

IMMEDIATE: Monday 2nd September 2013

 

 

TV3’s Paul Connolly unearths US traveller community allowing girls as young as 9 to marry.

 

‘Travellers In America: A Secret Society’ gains access to one of the wealthiest and most secretive communities in the whole of the US.

 

Paul Connolly travels to America’s Deep South to meet the notoriously media shy travellers and discuss their wealth, secrecy, rules and marriage traditions.

 

‘Travellers In America: A Secret Society’ airs Monday 2nd September at 9pm on TV3.

 

Interviews with Paul Connolly available on request.

 

Video link available on request.

 

Travellers In America: A Secret Society explores the remarkable story behind one of Irish history’s forgotten generations. Descended from a small number of families who first journeyed across the Atlantic in the late 1830s, this close-knit community of Irish travellers have since laid down roots. They’ve thrived and fast become one of the wealthiest and most enigmatic minorities in the whole of the US.

 

TV3 journalist, Paul Connolly, travelled to Murphy Village in South Carolina, where he was given access to this controversial community and their two distinct settlements for the first time in television history.

 

Paul spoke to Irish traveller and Murphy Village resident Tamara McKeown about why it is acceptable for girls being married at such a young age:

 

“What age your daughter gets married depends on, at the time, who’s getting married around you. Like if you have a nine-year-old daughter, and they’re marrying 14 and 15-year-olds, you’re going to wait. You don’t have to put her out now; you don’t have to move her yet. But if you have a nine-year-old daughter and they’re getting nine and ten-year-olds married, then it might be time to move her…or she’s going to be the only one left without a man.”

 

Another Murphy Villager, Bill McKeown, told Paul why wealth plays such an important part of traveller life:

 

“Back here everybody is all about money. Basically…it’s like keeping up with the Jones’ type of thing and everybody is in competition with each other. Money is everything.”

 

Money and traditions are not the only thing this society prides themselves on, their rules are not taken lightly. If a traveller breaks with tradition or rule, he or she can be shunned, exiled from the community. The effects of such a punishment can be felt for generations; often manifesting itself in exclusion from social circles, and, most critically, the refusal of other traveller families to match their children with that of the exiled traveller for marriage.

 

One rule discussed was drinking alcohol; Bill McKeown described how this is viewed in his community.

 

“Nobody really drinks. If you drink, you do it in secret. That’s, like, something to be shunned on – drugs, drinking, fighting and all that…that’s like – shunned.

 

“Yeah, basically if you’re drinking it’s like the same thing as you being a crack head.”

 

From the previously unexplained source of their wealth, to the volatile relationship they share with the outside world, Travellers in America: A Secret Society is a first and unforgettable insight into a world few knew existed.  

 

‘Travellers In America: A Secret Society’ airs Monday 2nd September at 9pm on TV3

 

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ENDS

 

For further information
Ciara Byrne

Press Officer

00353 1 419 3329

00353 87 319 9732

 

Sharon McHugh
Head of Press & Publicity

00353 1 419 3430
00353 87 922 4143

publicity@tv3.ie                        
www.tv3.ie

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