KILCULLEN: 21 May 2001: by Brian Byrne. Swift action on Saturday night by a Kilcullen factory owner may have prevented the town from being the latest target of traveller merchant invaders.
When three caravans moved onto private property adjoining the King Koil bed factory on the KDA Industrial Estate, the factory owners immediately brought in a security company, and set up barriers with articulated trucks.
Yesterday afternoon, they began a process of 'fortifying' the property by means of digging a trench around it with a JCB. A full metal fence may now have to be erected around the property by King Koil in order to fully protect it from illegal trabeller encampments in the future.
Many towns and villages in Kildare have been victims to large-scale incursions by travelling merchants in the past few years, including Naas, Clane, Celbridge, Caragh, Allen, Kill and Newbridge. Damage to property and large-scale dumping of refuse and commercial debris has invariably resulted, leaving the local communities and individual property owners to pick up the costs.
The problem continues to escalate throughout the country because of the failure of the State to institute or implement adequate laws of criminal trespass against the perpetrators of such incursions.
"It just seems they're afraid of a political backlash for being 'politically incorrect' if they go down that road," one victim of major property damage in such an incursion told KNN. "But if this keeps going on like this, the backlash will come because of their own inaction."