NAAS: 2 April 2001: by Brian Byrne & Trish Whelan. The owner of Naas Livestock Mart, Colm McEvoy, was threatened on two separate occasions when he confronted a horde of travellers who invaded his property last week and left after causing extensive damage.
And he says that it’s time for the same powers of seizure to be given to gardai as already exist for the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Customs & Excise.
Tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage was caused to property and furniture in the mart offices, which were broken into when the travellers were occupying the site, but the gardai say they have absolutely no power to deal with situations like this under the present legislation on trespass.
In fact they say also that their ‘hands are tied’ in relation to the criminal damage caused in incidents like that at the mart, because the rules of evidence require that a person is seen to be doing the damage by a witness who will testify in court. Given that large groups of travellers deny any involvement in such damage and ‘see nothing’ this is hard to achieve.
Colm McEvoy says things have now gone too far, with large groups of travellers able to thumb their noses and use the existing system to act in an outright lawless way. “They are thugs. They ignore the law. Their attitude is ‘we go in where we want’ and they wreck places. I think it should be brought home to the politicians in this country, many of whom do understand the seriousness of the situation, that it’s time the matter was dealt with once and for all.” He said other politicians seem to play the ‘politics of avoidance’ rather than confront the issue.
Colm McEvoy says he is not speaking just for himself because he has been at the receiving end of thuggery and destruction, but for everybody else who holds property and go about their business in a lawful way and also for those local authorities like Naas UDC who have suffered greviously at the hands of these people over the last few years.
“They come and they surround and invade a place overnight when nobody can defend their property. The night they came to the mart I was told about it and I went down and tried to block them from entering with my own car. At least 30 of them got around me and told me that if I didn’t get my car out of the way, they’d roll it over. The next day when I took the number of one man’s van, whom I found inside the mart building, he told me if I didn’t watch what I was doing, he wouldn’t be responsible for what would happen to my jeep.”
Mr McEvoy gave full credit to the gardai who came very quickly when called but said it was clear that their efforts to have the travellers move out were simply being ignored.
In addition to the physical damage to the building and fittings, sections of the property were left in a disgusting state. “When they wanted to go to the toilet, they didn’t even use the toilet that they’d broken into, but left excrement on the floors and in the cattle pens,” he said. “Apart from repairs to be done, the whole place will have to be fumigated and sterilised before it can be used again.”
Mr McEvoy has, over the last number of days, invited every member of Naas UDC to come and see what happened to his property. Cllr Charlie Byrne said it was a ‘disgraceful’ situation when the law of the land was ‘flouted with impunity’ and ordinary decent people and ratepayers were victimised without any apparent redress.
The premises is now under 24-hour guard by a security company, and a deep trench has been dug inside the gate. “Other people have had to do the same thing to their property in the area,” Mr McEvoy says. “What kind of a country and legal system do we have when decent people have to resort to medieval style defence of our property?”
The travellers only left the site after a raid by Customs & Excise officers backed up by gardai, resulting in a number of vehicles being confiscated because they had the wrong type of diesel in their tanks.
Subsequently after spending some time in the Palmerstown layby they tried to gain access to Naas Race Course via The Gallops estate. They were thwarted by local residents who threatened to have them removed with bulldozers.
“We had to tell the residents that this simply couldn’t be done,” a Naas garda spokesperson said afterwards. “Our people managed to persuade the travellers to move on, but that’s all we could do because we have no powers to either move them on or arrest them for trespass under the present legislation.”
This situation was confirmed by Inspector Pat Mangan of Naas who noted that in other jurisdictions, such as Wales, police did have proper powers to deal with these kind of incursions.
