‘Fence won’t keep us off Calary Commons’

May 1994

The controversial Calary fence will not prevent local travellers from camping on their traditional summer site at the foot of the Sugarloaf Mountain, it was predicted this week.

A spokesman for the Bray Travellers Network said that he believed that a number of families would move to Calary Commons ‘within weeks’, despite efforts of local landowners to prevent them from gaining access.

Jim O’Brien, who claims that a local farmer threatened to burn him out when he pulled on to the local commons with his wife and two children just a fortnight ago, said that the Wicklow travelling community believe that they have as much right to the Calary Commons as anyone else.

‘I have seen records dating back to the 1930s and 1940s which show that this place was being used for camping back as far as then, if not further. The Travelling community see what has happened at Calary as nothing short of land-grabbing, and are fearful that if the landowners get away with it here, then it will happen to common-age land all over Ireland.’

A Travellers representative on the Bray Enterprise Support Team and a member of the Board of Management of St Kieran’s Training Centre, Mr O’Brien said that he has been camping at Calary every summer for the last eight years.

His latest return to the site followed a family tragedy.

‘We moved up here to get away from it all, a little earlier than usual,’ said Mr O’Brien. ‘To us the Calary Commons are a special place,’ he said.

Mr O’Brien rejected claims that the place had been left untidy, or that visitors were intimidated. He said they have always made every effort to keep the site clean.