TRAVELLERS, MAINLY families with connections to Rathkeale, Co Limerick, will make a last-minute effort in the High Court in London today to prevent the eviction of up to 300 people from an illegal site in Essex, which could take place after midnight tonight.
Basildon Council has tried for 10 years to remove hundreds of travellers from Dale Farm on the grounds that the majority of families living there are breaking planning laws.
However, one family is seeking an emergency injunction today from Mr Justice Kenneth Parker in the Royal Courts of Justice for a two-month delay.
The Flynn family argue that they are already legally homeless because they lack permission to live at Dale Farm, but they want an alternative halting site in the area rather than housing, “to which as Travellers they feel a strong aversion”.
The former scrapyard at Dale Farm is legally owned by the Travellers and up to 50 families have planning permission for the houses, mobile homes and caravans there, but the site has spread significantly into the green belt since they moved in.
This has caused anger among many settled residents.
Actress Vanessa Redgrave, local Church of England bishop Stephen Cottrell and Catholic Bishop of Brentwood Thomas McMahon visited the site yesterday.
"I am completely opposed to what the council is doing," Redgrave told The Irish Times.
“The Travellers know that they have justice on their side. The council has refused to speak to the people who have land for alternative sites.”
Saying that he and Bishop McMahon had come “to show solidarity” with “a distressed and frightened community’, Bishop Cottrell said: “We are also asking the powers that be to think again because sweeping up this community and evicting its people is not going to solve anything.”
So far, Basildon Council has refused to say when the evictions will begin.
An order closing local roads does not come into force until Friday.
The evictions from Dale Farm – often called the largest Traveller settlement in Europe – could cost up to £18 million (€20.3 million), while Essex Constabulary has put aside up to £7 million to cover the costs of policing the operation.
The Catholic Church’s Irish chaplaincy in Britain has been closely involved in the controversy, arguing that it is “senseless and inhumane” to make up to 300 Travellers homeless when there is already “a dire shortage of Traveller sites nationwide”.
The chaplaincy’s spokesman, Joseph Cottrell-Boyce, said the appeals from religious leaders in Essex, the United Nations and Amnesty International showed there was a broad consensus holding that what the council was doing was morally wrong.
“The council’s claim that this eviction is a ‘reluctant last resort’ is laughable; we have yet to see the council offer any culturally sensitive alternative to the Dale Farm site, despite a willingness on behalf of the Travellers to compromise,” he said.
The presence of Redgrave at Dale Farm yesterday infuriated some settled locals, who complained on the local newspaper’s website that “she should buy land near her home if she is so bothered”.
