A month after the Dale Farm evictions in the UK, some Travellers have returned and are living on a neighbouring site. Travellers, the council and the locals remain unhappy

PATRICK EGAN was in Belgium during the evictions of Travellers from Dale Farm, in Essex, last month. This week he is back in England, standing, supported by crutches, inside his brick house on the site, pointing visitors towards cracks in the walls created, he says, by the work done since by Basildon Borough Council.

Egan, one of the few legally entitled to be on the plot of land, went to inspect his septic tank in the dark after being told that it had been damaged by the diggers and excavators that have filled the narrow lanes in recent weeks. “The ground gave way, and I fell into one of the trenches . . . I went to the hospital and found that I had cracked my ankle,” he says, tapping the cast.

Some of those forced out are now living on a legal site, Oak Lane, just over the fence from Dale Farm. Most of Oak Lane’s plots are now occupied by those forced out of Dale Farm. On the road outside, caravans return daily to set up without water or mains electricity.

Up to five families now live in caravans on this road. Egan and others insist it is private and not covered by the high court injunction, though on Wednesday evening Basildon Council officials told the occupants of the five caravans that they were in breach of the eviction order.

“These attempts to reoccupy the site are unacceptable and put them in contempt of court that could lead to a prison sentence,” said the Conservative council leader, Tony Ball, who has worked for years to end the illegal development of the former scrapyard.

Though almost the whole of Dale Farm is now uninhabitable because of trenches dug by the council, a number of caravans fill Egan’s legal plot.

Nora Egan, one of those living in his yard, cleans her borrowed caravan with a disinfectant-laden sponge. “We are living in a nightmare. I get panic attacks all the time,” she says, showing her reams of medication. She was treated for a cracked spine after last month’s eviction. The injury occurred, she says, when she was “thrown to the ground” by police as they broke through the fencing that lined the two-hectare site.

Today, the fencing is gone, replaced by banks of earth. A dividing line of scaffolding, tyres and timber that separated the Dale Farm Travellers from their next-door neighbour and bitter enemy Len Gridley has been replaced by galvanised steel.

One month on, nobody is happy: the Travellers because Dale Farm is no more, the council because the Travellers will not depart.

Gridley went to court last week for an injunction to force the council to return the land to green-belt, as it had said it would. The earth banks, he told the court, were an eyesore, and the legal Oak Lane site has been allowed to grow without planning permission. The court rejected his application, but Gridley made it clear that this was the first round.

“This is a complicated and lengthy process, but one we are committed. We are also committed to restoring Dale Farm to a site in keeping with its green-belt status,” says the council.

“I never thought I would find myself agreeing with Len Gridley,” says Patrick Egan, with a laugh, adding, “I hope that he takes them for a fortune, because I intend to sue the hell off them for the damage that they have done to my house.

“I own the road outside; it is a private road. They never asked my permission to bring heavy traffic on it, wrecking it as they done it,” he went on, adding that a toxicologist has been hired to take soil samples from the dug-out caravan sites. Egan says that asbestos and other dangerous material were removed – a claim denied by Basildon council.

Though no Travellers were arrested during the eviction itself, two, including Egan’s son Padraig, were arrested subsequently. He will appear before magistrates next month charged with violent disorder. Sixty-three-year-old Michael Slattery has already received a nine-month conditional discharge and a fine after facing a charge of a racially-aggravated public-order offence.

Some of the returnees insist they have tried to find halting sites elsewhere.“We went everywhere for 100 miles around, and there isn’t a spot available. Every place is full,” said one woman, who declined to be named.

Sitting in her caravan smoking a cigarette in one of the legal plots on Oak Lane, where she has been allowed to live temporarily by a relation, Kathleen Slattery wonders how long the council will take to come with her eviction notice.

Although the Oak Lane plots are legal, they are subject to licensing conditions. Even the Travellers accept that they are now in breach of those conditions. The council seems unwilling for now to force them to move, though it insists that it will, in time.

Despite a “Travellers Return” headline in the local Basildon Echo, the Travellers will be unable to reoccupy any more of the illegal, developed land unless they attempt to bring in their own diggers, a move that would be resisted.

All bar one of the non-Traveller supporters who lived at Dale Farm in the weeks before the evictions are now gone. The last of them, Marina Pepper, is living in one of the few structures still standing on the land, a chalet belonging to Margaret McCarthy. “She’s gone to stay with relatives in Cambridgeshire, I think,” says Pepper, who has lived in the chalet without heat, struggling in vain to keep the dirt outside from coming in. “The generator eats diesel, so I prefer light and the computer,” she says, with a smoke-filled cough.

The Travellers have taken the upheaval “awfully well”, Pepper says. “Well, maybe not. They’re driving each other bonkers, because they are all living in overcrowded conditions.”

The Travellers who have returned have to fetch water while struggling to keep homes clean. “They had laundry and washing-machines in the old place. They didn’t have much, but they had modern lives of a sort. Now all of that is gone.”

Travellers' travails: Facing up to the big issues

Dale Farm has brought Travellers to the attention of Britons in a way unmatched even by My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and they are unlikely to be far from the headlines in the future.The Localism Bill, which gives local communities a greater say in planning decisions, has now been passed by the Westminster parliament; it is unlikely to offer good news for Travellers.

“I’m very concerned about the impact the legislation could have,” Anastasia Crickley, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, told the national conference of the Irish Traveller Movement in Great Britain on Thursday.

The populist position adopted by the department of communities and local government under the tough-talking Conservative Eric Pickles, the MP for Brentwood, not far from Dale Farm, is “fairly alarming”, says Brian Foster, an expert in Traveller education issues.

Illiteracy is rife within the community, with Traveller children the most likely to be suspended from schools. Many Traveller women suffer from depression, while suicide rates for Traveller men, particularly those held in prison, is “seven to eight times” higher than the national average.

Young men, unable to read or write, fail to apply for driving tests. If they are licensed, they often struggle to get insurance, as they are faced with exorbitant premiums once they give a halting-site address.

For older men, education gaps mean they lack the health-and-safety certificates and other paperwork necessary to work on building sites, “even if they are actually highly skilled at what they do”. A social worker said she had contacted Irish building firms to get a job for one skilled Traveller, only to be told, “Oh, he’ll only nick our tools.”

Adult education fails to meet their needs, as many of the courses start at too high a level for many Travellers, who are wary about taking part in the first place as “they don’t want to be made feel like they are the dunces”.

Progress is being made, however, particularly by the Toe by Toe literacy programme in prisons, in which prisoners get 20 minutes each day of one-to-one tuition to bring them to a level at which they are comfortable studying with others.