Cork County Council seeks to move mobile home
Last week, Emma O’Driscoll and Jason O’Donoghue, who had been living with their three children in a caravan on the green area of Beechfield Estate in Fermoy, had a larger mobile home delivered to the green, provoking an angry response from local residents.
The couple say they ordered the larger mobile home as the cramped and damp conditions in the smaller caravan were negatively impacting their five-month-old daughter’s health.
Residents, who object to the mobile home being placed on the green, had blocked in the truck used to deliver the home to the green. However, they yesterday lifted this blockade to allow the truck to leave after a week in the estate.
On Tuesday, Judge Brian O’Callaghan refused an application from Cork County Council for an ex parte interim injunction, and ordered that notice of motion for today’s proceedings be served on the couple.
Speaking to Patricia Messinger on C103’s Cork Today programme, Trevor, a man living in Beechfield Estate, said residents voted to allow the truck to leave yesterday as a “goodwill gesture”.
“We also believe that we got the message across, over the time that we had the truck,” said Trevor. “It was not an easy decision to release the truck but hopefully he has learned his lesson. The owner of the truck contacted us and was under financial difficulty. His loss of earning with the truck being blocked in for seven days has caused a lot of financial loss to the company and so this is the main reason why the good people of Beechfield have released the truck, only because we were contacted by the manager of the truck asking for it back.
“We do feel that he was actually wrong here too, you can’t just pick up a caravan or mobile home and drop it in the middle of an estate because it’s going to cause problems.”
Trevor said residents have maintained a 24-hour vigil at the green since the mobile home was delivered.
Speaking on the same programme, Fine Gael councillor Noel McCarthy said there should be an onus on haulage companies to check that any mobile homes they are asked to deliver have permission to be dropped at that location.
