Traveller families who are being asked by Fingal County Council to leave land they occupy in Dunsink Lane are as entitled as anyone to claim squatters' rights, writes Kitty Holland
They never wanted to live here in the first place. They had been happy where they were. "Who would choose to live next to a dump?" asks Mary "Ninny" Joyce. "But we have to live somewhere and now [Fingal County Council] want the land back. Well this bit of land is all most of us have."
The attractive, casually but smartly dressed woman in her 40s is standing atop a mound of mud in the caravan bay where her sister, Bernadette, still lives, on Dunsink Lane, in northwest Dublin.
Her extended family has lived here for almost 30 years. They came originally against their will, however. "My family was dragged up here by the council when we were little children. We were living in a row near the Erin's Isle [GAA Club in Finglas] and the council said we were an eyesore. So they dragged us up here out of sight, out of mind, next to the biggest dump in the country, and hoped they could forget about us.
"They gave us no electricity, no running water. The things we had to suffer. It was like eating dust every day, with the filthy lorries coming in past our homes every day. And the amount of kiddies that got knocked over."
They did not want to move into houses, which was the only alternative the council offered. So, with the children in local schools, and having started scrap-metal and mechanic businesses on-site, they opted to stay.
Now, more than two decades on, they are fighting for some compensation, or means to move, by claiming "adverse possession", otherwise known as "squatter's rights".
Controversy about their claims erupted last weekend when the Sunday Times led with a story concerning her brothers' dealings with the local authority. "Three members of the Travelling community, including one serving a jail sentence, are being paid almost €3 million by Fingal County Council for land at Dunsink Lane in west Dublin, on which they have been squatting," it reported. The council denied the report.
The following day the Evening Herald led with the headline "The Squatter Millionaires", saying that one of the families was "set to become a millionaire thanks to taxpayers' money".
Some along the lane, Mary Joyce concedes, have made a lot of money over the years (and some by criminal means). But neither she nor her sister are among them, she insists.
The women are among the 15 or so who have lodged claims for possession. About 45 families live in Dunsink Lane. Any family that has lived there for more than 12 years and is now being asked to leave by Fingal County Council is within its rights to claim adverse possession to their de facto homes.
HOWEVER, AS BARRISTER Paul Anthony McDermott explains: "If they have been living there and no one has complained or tried to put them off the land, they are entitled, after 12 years, to conclude they have possession of it. Travellers are in the same position as any other citizen before the law."
He describes as "interesting" the contrast in the tone of the coverage with that last month about Sligo man Harry Hallowes (70), who likewise asserted the adverse possession rule when a developer tried to evict him from his home of 30 years on London's Hampstead Heath.
"A Sligo native is sitting on an €3 million fortune in the centre of London and won't sell for love nor money," glowed the Sligo Weekender.
"He can't think of a better place to live," enthused RTÉ's London correspondent Brian O'Connell.
"If it's someone the media like, like a little old lady or a homeless Irishman in England, then they have done well," says McDermott. "If the media doesn't like them they are portrayed as having scammed. But the Travellers here are not getting special treatment."
And nor have they ever, insists Joyce.
Lack of services from the council, and the riots of 2004, which resulted from a stand-off at one end of the lane when Fingal County Council erected a barrier to curb criminal activity in the vicinity, "really messed up relations with the settled community", she says.
Though basic facilities are all but absent, after more than 20 years, those dwelling in most of the bays have fashioned attractive sanctuaries off the lane. Many caravans have fencing around them, some with flowerpots and others with garden furniture and decking.
None however, has hot running water, electricity or a rubbish collection. Most have portable toilets, the only facilities provided by Fingal County Council.
Joyce says she moved out "a few months ago" as she grew tired of the life. "I live in rented accommodation in Finglas now," she says. "But it's not secure either. It's not my home. I'd prefer to be near my mother and sister because we look out for each other. But I just couldn't endure the life any more."
Most, she believes, want to move out of the lane but have nowhere to go and limited means - apart from their land - to buy elsewhere. "That's all we want - a place to live."
THE COUNCIL ARGUES it could not provide facilities for the unauthorised Travellers in Dunsink as to do so would have given some official recognition of their residence there.
"We never wanted to regularise that site," says David O'Connor, Fingal County Manager. None of the families there ever applied for housing, he adds.
He says he was "dismayed" last week by the tone of the coverage of the families' claims for title to the land. "It is not a Traveller issue. It is a property issue." He says the one payout so far will be the largest and that most will be "much smaller".
"And the value we get back for the land will far outweigh the settlement," he adds.
The council has become determined to repossess the land in order to enact its grand vision for the whole Dunsink area. Grafton Architects has for two years been working with a New York landscape-design company, Scape, on "strategies and scenarios" for the vast area, bordered by the Tolka River, the N3, the M50 and the Royal Canal, and home to Dunsink Observatory, Elmgreen golf course as well as gardens and some agricultural land.
Dunsink Lane is just a tiny part of the 1,030 acres, points out Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects.
The area, once dominated by the most notorious, putrid dump in the State, is, at 1,040 acres, 200 acres bigger than New York's Central Park and more than half the size of nearby Phoenix Park.
"The landfill is now covered over," Farrell says, and the final top-soil will be put on in the next two years. It is now a rolling hill, about 200 acres in all, and rising "higher than the Wellington Monument" in the Phoenix Park. "The views are stunning," she says.
Machines have been leaching noxious methane from the mound for a decade, and the Environmental Protection Agency has given the area a "clean bill of health" for the past three consecutive years, says O'Connor.
Says Farrell: "It's stunningly beautiful. We had people over from New York walking over it recently, on a beautiful summer day and they couldn't believe this was here in a city. There were butterflies and wild flowers."
She says that, while the Phoenix Park is "gentrified and manicured", the visions for Dunsink include themed gardens; underground and overground horse-riding; a link-up between Dunsink Observatory, the Botanic Gardens and the Zoological Gardens, making science "a cultural anchor"; water sports; angling; an outdoor auditorium; and an enormously wide, grass-covered bridge, "like a field" going over the M50, to reconnect Dunsink with the Phoenix Park.
"We are thinking long-term, thinking of what the area could be like in 50 years," says Farrell.
Nothing definitive has been planned and proposals are still being drawn up before consultation with other landowners in the area, residents and councillors gets underway.
"We are very hungry to put this out and get going on it," says David O'Connor.
In the meantime, the majority of Travellers whose homes are in Dunsink do not know what the future holds for them.
"They don't know what's happening, and the fact is the council didn't want to know about them until the land became valuable," says Niamh McTiernan of Finglas Traveller Development Group.
O'Connor, however, says the council is "thinking very positively" about the Travellers, and those that do not successfully claim possession will be rehoused elsewhere, or possibly on-site, as part of the redevelopment.
AT THE MOMENT, the council is disputing all the adverse possession claims, O'Connor says, "so it will be some time before we know what's happening".
A judgment from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, due in mid-July, may hasten proceedings. The court is due to rule definitively on whether the adverse possession rule contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.
The case "JA Pye v the United Kingdom" involves an Oxford company that claims its rights were contravened when an occupier gained title to €31 million-worth of grazing land by asserting squatter's rights. The company's appeal against that decision was upheld, but that judgment is now being appealed in Europe by the United Kingdom.
Paul Anthony McDermott believes Pye has a point and that the "squatter's rights" rule is a "blunt instrument".
"There is still a question mark over the constitutionality of adverse possession," he says. "It will be interesting to see whether things change when the ruling is given. But as things stand the Travellers have just as much right to seek possession of their homes after 12 years as anyone else would."