US paper features travellers' battle (From Echo)

US paper features travellers' battle

1:55am Wednesday 26th March 2008 in

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THE Dale Farm traveller site has made international headlines.

The plight of 86 families fighting to stay in illegally-built homes at the Crays Hill site has been reported by the US capital's most famous newspaper, the Washington Post.

The paper recently ran a lengthy article, critical of Basildon Council's eviction plan, written by Iain Guest, founder of human rights organisation, the Advocacy Project. The Washington-based lobby group is campaigning to help the travellers remain on the Dale Farm site.

In it, Mr Guest warns the health care and education of Dale Farm travellers would be "brutally interrupted" if they were evicted.

He points to the success of a local anti-smoking clinic in getting 200 travellers to quit within six months and says such benefits would be lost if the council moved families on.

The travellers' High Court battle features in a ten-minute film posted on the YouTube website by he Advocacy Project.

In the film, elderly Dale Farm traveller Michael Slattery talks of handcuff scars he still bears from the time he was evicted from a site in Hertfordshire.

He adds: "When they put us out of here where in the name of God are we going to go?

"If somebody came to your home, putting you out, what would you do?"

Dale Farm spokesman Mary Anne McCarthy, 76, adds in the film: "There are a lot of cancer patients, ill people and people in wheelchairs.

"They say you can get a doctor anywhere, but what if you're terminally ill and need treatment every second day, you have to have an address."