COMPANIES located in Ennis's main industrial estate are to take legal action against the local authorities over an encampment of travellers on the estate.
The group from the Gort Road Industrial Estate at a meeting expressed "their desperation and frustration" despite assurances by the local authority that there would be a response to the issue.
A spokesman for the companies, Mr Seamus O'Sullivan, who is also president of IBEC in the mid west region, said yesterday there were security and environmental issues at stake. The county council had a statutory responsibility to provide a proper place for work, he said, and the industrial estate was designed for manufacturing and service enterprises and was "not an appropriate place for travellers to settle with young people running around willy nilly".
He said that council officials had given a commitment two weeks ago that the open spaces on the industrial estate would be secured and that the trespassing caravans would be fenced off, with proper toilet facilities provided and that horses would be moved away from the factories.
He described the local authorities' response as "the total lack of will to apply the law. We have a Wandering Horses Act, a Litter Act and a Trespass Act, and nothing is being done".
Mr O'Sullivan, managing director of a company on the estate, said one company had threatened to relocate to Dublin if the problem was not resolved.
The secretary of Clare County Council, Mr Tom Coughlan, said: "I comment on legal proceedings, but the reason we have this problem is because we had a travellers site at Drumcliffe which the High Court ordered to be closed down and we have complied with this order.
"At the same time we have a programme to provide accommodation for travellers, but we have been hindered by local communities who are refusing to accept sites and restrained by the courts to provide temporary sites. We don't have an authorised site for travellers at present," he said.
Mr Coughlan said the council had established a task force to provide a plan for all travelling families in the county and it had extended an invitation to the industrialists in Gort Road to sit on this task force.
There are 19 enterprises in the industrial estate, employing more than 1,000 people, and 13 travelling families are involved in the controversy. Ennis's official halting site at Drumcliffe was closed following objections by local residents.