Support the Dale Farm families - Put a marker down to stop the racist onslaught against Travellers

Shane
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:52:46 +0000
Travellers, Community, Migration / racism, International, Images, Opinion, News, Shane OCurry

Dale Farm is a halting site which is also the largest concentration of Irish Travellers in Britain, being home to over 1000 people (about 100 families), many of whom are said to have their cultural roots in Rathkeale in Limerick. It was started in the 1960s when a number of families bought the former scrapyard site and Basildon council granted planning permission for 40 houses. This happened in the context of broad progress in race relations and a brief breeze of relative official tolerance for Travellers, epitomised in the liberal-sponsored 1968 Caravan Sites Act. Basildon Council have put aside an £18 million budget to bulldoze the site and forcefully evict the families (a staggering figure when you consider that in 2010 the total UK budget for providing Travellers with halting facilities was less than 30 million).