{"id":438117,"date":"2026-04-16T13:05:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T13:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/438117\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T13:05:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T13:05:13","slug":"fiona-looney-heres-one-of-the-profoundly-sad-reasons-the-traveller-community-tolerate-extreme-violence-such-as-the-brutal-killing-of-a-young-mother-i-should-know-i-encountered-it-first-hand-recen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/438117\/","title":{"rendered":"FIONA LOONEY: Here’s one of the profoundly sad reasons the Traveller community tolerate extreme violence such as the brutal killing of a young mother… I should know I encountered it first hand recently"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of months back, I stayed in a hotel in Kilkenny where most of the other overnight guests were members of the Travelling community attending a nearby wedding.<\/p>\n

At breakfast the next morning, the style of the younger guests was nothing short of fabulous \u2013 I did wonder if they\u2019d slept in their wedding outfits \u2013 and the women\u2019s lively post mortem of the day before made for some highly enjoyable eavesdropping.<\/p>\n

On the way back to my room, I shared an elevator with two of the teenage girls. The lift had only just started to rise when it suddenly came to an unscheduled shuddering stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018This must be your worst nightmare,\u2019 one of the two girls said to me. I laughed, and complimented my stalled travelling companions on their dresses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We were soon moving again. The wedding had been brilliant, they told me; everyone had enjoyed the day.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t the lift that has stuck with me since. Rather, it was a young girl, no more than 15 or 16 years old, who had surmised that people like her automatically incite fear and suspicion in people like me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For all that we had laughed at the situation, I couldn\u2019t \u2013 I can\u2019t \u2013 get over the shockingly low level of self-worth that had already been ingrained in those beautiful young girls.<\/p>\n

I thought of them again three weeks ago, when 29-year-old Scarlett Faulkner was beaten unconscious in broad daylight on the side of the road outside Birdhill. This week, she died of her injuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to reports, both the victim and two women arrested and charged in connection with the attack were members of the Travelling community. The girl charged with beating Faulkner with an iron bar is 16 years old.<\/p>\n

Everything about the senseless killing of Scarlett, who leaves behind a young daughter, is unfathomably sad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it is also abhorrent and horrific: it is rare enough that women kill; the charge that a 16-year-old girl has carried out this heinous outrage is almost unthinkable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it would be disingenuous to try to make sense of what happened to Scarlett Faulkner without acknowledging that everyone involved comes from the Travelling community.<\/p>\n

In an interview with The Irish Times in the wake of the assault on Scarlett, John Connors, Traveller, actor and activist, condemned the attack and said that while his community had been discriminated against for generations, \u2018you can\u2019t blame discrimination on this\u2019.<\/p>\n

Acknowledging that the attack was due to a \u2018personal\u2019 dispute rather than an \u2018ongoing feud\u2019, he nonetheless voiced concerns about a broader issue with feuding \u2013 a problem that he says is being stoked by social media posts and videos of Traveller fights and violence (footage of the attack on Faulkner was viewed more than 1.5 million times on X.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018The only people who disagreed with me or called me out were what I would call the \u2018NGO Travellers\u2019,\u2019 said Connors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018These people don\u2019t want to talk about the negative sides of our community. They want to only talk about discrimination.\u2019<\/p>\n

In 2023, a report authored by Sarah Sartori, a researcher and educator based in South East Technological University, found interfamily violence was \u2018a pervasive problem affecting Traveller individuals and their families\u2019.<\/p>\n

She concluded that while \u2018only a minority of Travellers engage in interfamily violence\u2019, it is \u2018a conflict that negatively impacts on virtually all sections of the Traveller community\u2019.<\/p>\n

What happened to Scarlett was not a direct result of a feud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it does not seem unreasonable that people who grow up in an environment where violence is normalised and even celebrated have a different standard of what constitutes acceptable behaviour than people who don\u2019t come from that community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More than that, the tragic low levels of self-worth among the Travelling community mean that as well as shockingly high rates of suicide, there is almost an inevitability of extreme violence: as in, the settled community already expects this of us, so we might as well live down to those expectations.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what the solution is. But I do know that dismissing the brutal killing of a 29-year-old mother as a \u2018Traveller problem\u2019 does not serve any of us \u2013 Traveller or settled \u2013 well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a happier place, two beautiful teenage girls got stuck in a lift with a settled woman and reckoned this must be her worst nightmare. I keep thinking about that. Because to me, those two unrelated incidents don\u2019t really seem to be worlds apart.<\/p>\n

I see that Justin Bieber was paid $10million by Coachella for sitting at his laptop and casting YouTube videos. I do exactly the same thing most weekends and all I get is a free trip to the Re-turn machine.<\/p>\n

\"Artemis <\/p>\n

Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch being greeted by her dog upon her return home<\/p>\n

Closer inspection of the sweet video of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch returning home to an enthusiastic welcome from her labrador, Sadie suggests the dog is happier to see Koch\u2019s husband than the space adventurer. It reminds me of when my eldest daughter returned from her J1 in New York and our dog was more overwhelmed to see me back \u2013 after less than an hour away \u2013 than the girl who\u2019d been on the other side of the Atlantic for three months.<\/p>\n

A local councillor told a radio programme there were \u2018some sore heads\u2019 in the Holywood Golf Club the morning after local hero Rory McIlroy\u2019s Masters win. I\u2019m surprised: footage of Rory\u2019s fans in the club bar sitting at nearly empty tables suggested to me that it was a particularly slow night at the tills.<\/p>\n

Speaking of over-indulgence, are we absolutely certain that Donald Trump doesn\u2019t drink alcohol? Surely his absolutely unhinged behaviour of the past ten days suggests that he\u2019s completely plastered all the time now. Perhaps somebody should check the Diet Coke button in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

As a part-time caretaker for a communal cat, I\u2019m cheered by the news that neighbours Adam Clayton and Noel Gallagher have discovered they also share custody of the Oasis star\u2019s cat, Boots, in their London homes. Clearly, the spoilt moggie has found what she\u2019s looking for and doesn\u2019t look back in anger as she trips between her two homes (look, if either band had bothered writing a song about a cat, that line would have worked much better.)<\/p>\n

\"Kathryn <\/p>\n

Kathryn Thomas ‘admitted’ she uses Botox<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it interesting how Kathryn Thomas\u2019s documenting her Botox treatments has been widely reported as the presenter \u2018admitting\u2019 she uses the injectables, as though it\u2019s some sort of crime? I\u2019d be willing to bet that if Thomas detailed her daily use of SPF, it wouldn\u2019t be branded an admission: honestly, this absolute double standard of expecting women on television to look fabulous but being sniffy about how they go about it isn\u2019t a good look for anyone.<\/p>\n

I see that Chris Evans and TFI Friday are set to return to Channel 4 this week, 30 years after the iconic programme first ripped up the rulebook for live television. The big question this time round though, is will they still think it\u2019s OK to publicly weigh Victoria Beckham?<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The Chappell Roan saga is over<\/p>\n

Thank God that Chappell Roan has now been fully exonerated in what was shaping up to be the biggest scandal of the year: a suggestion that an adult didn\u2019t enjoy being stared at by a child over a hotel breakfast buffet. In a new update, footballer Jorginho has cleared the singer of any wrongdoing in the crisis, and suggested that she\u2019s as much a victim as his 12-year-old stepdaughter, who was given out to for gawking by another adult. At last, the world can move on: though can any of us ever really put Chappell-gate behind us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple of months back, I stayed in a hotel in Kilkenny where most of the other overnight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[118,12389,18,117,19,17,168351],"class_list":["post-438117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-dailymail","tag-debate","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-m-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116414534950621544","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}