Travellers cannot park wherever they like

MEMBERS of the Travelling community cannot be allowed to park their mobile homes wherever they liked while awaiting provision of accommodation by local authorities, a High Court judge said yesterday.

Mr Justice O’Neill said the problem of provision of accommodation for Travellers and the endless moving of them from place to place had beset and bedeviled the courts for many years.

He told Mr James Macken, SC, counsel for Clare County Council and Ennis Town Council, that if Travellers applied to a local authority to be housed there would be inevitable delay.

The court had been asked to decide if, pending a delay, it was open to a member of the Travelling community to pitch their caravan on property belonging to a local authority and assert that they should not be moved on until the housing or accommodation, by way of halting site, was provided.

“It seems to me that is an untenable situation and, if it were to be the case, it would mean, in effect, that all land in the ownership of a local authority could be taken over and whatever use it was meant to be used for would inevitably be frustrated,” Mr Justice O’Neill said.

He refused an application by several Traveller families to be allowed to re-position their homes on roadside sites and a public playground from which they had been seized and removed by gardai under recent legislation empowering them to do so.

Mr Patrick Gageby, SC, counsel for the Travellers, told the court his clients had taken out proceedings challenging the constitutionality of the new legislation which, he said, amounted to the application of criminal law to what had previously been a civil law matter.

He said that pending the High Court determination of his clients’ claims at full trial they sought to be permitted to replace their homes on sites from which they had been seized.