and some own property there. The newspaper said of the residents: "They deny any connections, yet some of them appear on deeds of homes, others on planning applications for houses and yet more on the electoral register." It also notes that Matthew Brindley, of the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, said: "Some people might have property elsewhere but the vast majority do not." Jake Fulton, of Save Dale Farm, said: "If this is true I would be very surprised." The Travellers also have links to the local area, with many of their children attending a local Crays Hill school in Billericay. Early in the morning of 19 May 2005, a fire swept through a chalet, killing both John and Cathleen McCarthy and destroying three adjacent caravans. The Council has questioned why pitches in the legal part of the site are usually unoccupied. However, "Grattan Puxon, a campaigner for Travellers, said the owners would spend much of the year travelling. ... and some of the plots also had to be vacated before the electricity company carried out work at some of the plots" Robert Home stated in a telephone interview that "the travellers [sic] would normally be on the road between April and October and use a more permanent site over the winter months. But many had remained at Dale Farm for a longer period to counter the threat of eviction." In February 2009, Billericay MP John Baron urged the priest of the local Catholic Church in Wickford to use his "influence to persuade the travellers to leave the site to avoid confrontations over the eviction". The priest responded that instead, he would be joining the anti-eviction protests, and that the church had already offered to provide temporary shelter for mothers and children of the community. 2011 eviction In October 2011, a legal process that had taken ten years, reaching as far as the Court of Appeal, concluded with the ruling that Basildon Council has acted lawfully in refusing planning permission for the disputed portion of Dale Farm. Prior to the clearance of the illegally occupied portion of the site, the entirety of Dale Farm contained about 100 families. On 15 March 2011, Basildon Council voted 28 to 10 to move 86 families from Dale Farm. During a series of secret talks over the following six months between Travellers leader Richard Sheridan, council leader Tony Ball and head of planning Dawn