Dale Farm residents voice final plea | Dale Farm Travellers

Dale Farm residents voice final plea

Posted on September 18, 2011 by dalefarmsupport

With 24 hours until the eviction of Dale Farm, residents voice a final plea for an alternative site to move onto as they face forced eviction from their homes. Members of the community, joined by local and international supporters, are preparing to defend the Traveller community that bought the former scrap yard in Essex, a decade ago.

Many of the 87 families on the site have nowhere to go and are in a last minute struggle to make provisions for children and older people about to be thrown out of their homes when bailiffs Constant & Co, reputed for the aggressive and violent removal of Traveller families, move in on Monday.

The eviction plans, fought for ten years in numerous legal battles, have been widely condemned, including by the United Nations, Amnesty International and an all party parliamentary group. The plans are considered a breach of multiple rights of the families involved including the failure of authorities to find the community appropriate alternative accommodation.

Kathryn Flynn, mother of three and resident at Dale Farm for ten years said “I’m moving on to my uncle’s yard on the other side for tonight because I don’t want my children to go through this. I’m scared of what the bailiffs will do. They smash up our trailers – our homes. I don’t want my children to be in danger, so we’re moving them. But we’ve got nowhere to go after Monday. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us. Our children went to school for the last day on Friday. I don’t know what to tell them about tomorrow.”

Fears of the conduct of bailiffs are not unfounded. Video footage showing the bailiffs aggressively removing Travellers from their homes and destroying their possessions were highlighted by the Judge in the 2008 legal case [1]. On Saturday 17September the Council admitted that it was aware that Constant and Co were using the word ‘pikey’, classed as a racist term of abuse since 2007, to attract people to the company’s website [2].

Activists and residents have been preparing defences to hold the site. Many have a sense of wider responsibility to defend the rights of Travellers who have been consistently discriminated against for centuries. John McCarthy, a Dale Farm resident for ten years said: “I’m standing here for the rights of Travellers. I’m here baring my heart to the press every day because this has got to change. My children can’t go through what we went through. We’re treated worse than any other community. They think it’s ok to break up a whole community and to throw us all on the roadside. To tell us we can’t come into shops, to pick on our kids, to treat us like we’re hardly human. We need to stand up against this prejudice. We need the right to live in peace. It’s not much to ask, to be allowed to live on an old scrap yard as a community.”

The Council has declared that they will begin their assault on Dale Farm on Monday morning.

Notes to Editors

[1] Judge Justice Collins comments in 2008 (1) “I have seen video footage which shows how the bailiffs employed by the council acted. The conduct was unacceptable and the evictions were carried out in a fashion which inevitably would have led to harm of those affected.”

[2] http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/09/constant-and-co-dale-farm

via dalefarm.wordpress.com