THE HIGH Court has ordered a Traveller family to leave the site of their illegal encampment near the M1 motorway in Dublin.
Mr Justice Michael Peart, however, postponed his order for three months after saying the Gavin family faced real problems, which required a “fresh, imaginative and realistic approach” from the authorities.
Without such an approach, the matter would not go away but would keep returning to the court for “some sort of inevitably short-term solution”. To date, Dublin City Council had adopted a “minimalist approach” to the family’s concerns about having to return to an estate where they faced threats.
Dublin City Council brought the High Court proceedings seeking to compel about 100 members of the Gavin family to remove their 30 caravans from the 42-acre former Dublin Port Tunnel works site near the junction of Oscar Traynor Road and the M1/N32.
The Gavins said they were not trespassing because the only alternative accommodation offered to them, an official site where they had lived previously, was too dangerous for them due to a feud with a neighbouring family, the Quinn-McDonaghs.
The Gavins claimed they were driven out of St Dominick’s Park in Belcamp by the Quinn-McDonaghs in 2005 following several serious incidents, including shots being fired at them and petrol bombs being thrown at their caravans.
They moved on to the M1 site in February 2008 following a court order requiring them to vacate another site near Lusk, Co Dublin.
The city council said the only accommodation available was at the family’s former residence in St Dominick’s Park. The council told the court it had spent €160,000 cleaning up the St Dominick’s site and installing CCTV cameras.