A HEAVILY pregnant woman has been engaged in a stand-off this week with Cork County Council after the local authority attempted to remove her illegally-parked mobile home from a site in Bantry on Tuesday morning.
Christina Delaney, who is nine months pregnant, has said she is not for moving.
She is standing guard at the site, beside an official halting site, with her six-year-old daughter Annemarie, her three-year-old son Jim, and her husband Peter (30).
Council operatives, supported by several gardaí, began demolishing a small caravan and two sheds, which contained some of the family’s possessions, at 7am on Tuesday and removed the debris via a skip and a low loader.
The workers left shortly before 1pm, leaving the mobile home still on site.
Cork County Council confirmed the site is their property.
‘The site is separate and distinct from the halting site,’ a spokesperson told The Southern Star.
‘There has been unauthorised occupation of the site in recent times, which necessitated the Council seeking a court order for the site to be vacated. The Council was successful in securing the court order earlier this year. The court order was served on the occupants. It required them to clear the site so that vacant possession could be returned to the Council.’
The Council said that as the occupants failed to comply with the court order, the Council opted to ‘clear the site’.
Christina said she is now fearful that the Council will wait until she goes into hospital to have her baby before removing the mobile home and making her family homeless.
In the meantime, she and her husband are taking turns to stand vigil.
She denied suggestions they had been offered alternative accommodation. ‘We have nowhere to go,’ she said. ‘If they want to remove my home, they are going to have to do it with me and my family in it.’
‘I had complications with my first pregnancy and had to have an emergency section,’ she said. ‘And because of diabetes I had to be taken in two weeks early with my second. What the Council did to me on Tuesday hasn’t helped. They have put me under an awful lot of pressure.’
‘I can’t go to the shops, or do anything, unless Peter is here, and I’ve kept my daughter out of school because she is terrified that her home will be gone when she comes back.’
She added: ‘We’ve never been in trouble with the Council or the courts and I just hope they are not going to leave me here for the next three weeks and then take my house when I go into hospital to have my baby.’
In recent times, this site next to the halting site had been used to hold two donkeys – which were not owned by Christina or her husband – that people described as ‘neglected.’
For months it put a media spotlight on the site until a local woman purchased the donkeys and gave them to an animal rescue centre.
Meanwhile, in recent months, Christina Delaney and her husband swapped out a smaller caravan for a larger mobile home in order to accommodate their new baby and some local objectors say this is a flagrant breach of planning.
Christina said they offered the Council rent for the site, but it was refused.
‘I don’t know how this is going to end,’ she said, ‘but they can’t leave us on the side of the road with three kids.’
