5:00am Saturday 8th November 2008
By Jon Austin
TRAVELLERS at Dale Farm, Crays Hill, are refusing to fill out forms sent by Basildon Council asking for medical details.
The council has scrapped another eviction vote next week, but still wants the travellers to fill out a welfare questionnaire.
It requests a note from doctors stating whether treatment now being received by the travellers could be provided by other clinics outside the district.
The travellers’ solicitor, Keith Lomax, told the council it was a “wholly inappropriate” request as it is slanted towards a particular answer to help the councils case by implying they could be treated anywhere, even on the roadside.
He said: “What is needed is information on the impact of treatment in the event the patient is evicted on to the open road.”
Travellers are waiting for the council to reconsider new personal details about them, as ordered by a High Court judge in May.
Travellers’ spokeswoman Kath- leen McCarthy, said: “We have one young mother expecting triplets. If that’s not a change in circumstances what would they take into account?”
Mothers are holding a prayer meeting in the Saint Christopher chapel on Sunday. A French priest, with links to Roma in France, will be address the meeting.
They have also invited members of Ramsden Crays Residents’ Assoc- iation to meet with them in the community centre on Tuesday, after getting no response to their applications to join the organisation. The association refuses to comment.
Joe Jones, Gypsy Council secretary, also this week placed a request with the UN advisory group on forced evictions, which met in Beijing, to create a register of traveller sites facing eviction, with Dale Farm as most under threat.
Last month Dale Farm was raised at the Seventh World Romani Congress in Croatia.
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