WE look back at the stories that were making the headlines this week in the Andersonstown News in 1982
Roisin McDonnell, Andersonstown Leisure Centre cleaning staff, presents Fr McCorry with cheque for St Agnes' Lourdes Disabled Fund
British Army camps causing serious health hazards in West Belfast
FOLLOWING recent claims in this newspaper of British military involvement in planning decision, we now have evidence that British Army camps, both in occupation and vacated, are causing a serious health hazard to the people of West Belfast.
Serious sewerage problems have been encountered in areas beside British Army camps, due to their common practice of blocking main sewer pipes to prevent bombs being place beneath their premises.
Only last week workmen arrived at the old Silver City base in Andersonstown to clear a sewer pipe which had been causing dangerous flooding in the locality. Locals believe the British Army had poured cement into the drains.
In the early ’70s it became known that the RUC tried to dam the culverted Farset River at Millfield for fear that the IRA would float a bomb down into Hastings Street Barracks.
Cement was also poured into manholes in Moyard because the British felt that the Henry Taggart camp, lying as it does at the bottom of the estate, was vulnerable to such a “floating bomb”. It now appears that these defensive actions have affected the district sewerage system and are posing dangerous threat to health.
Vomiting and diarrhoea among children (an infection usually associated with an insanitary environment) is common place amongst children in Moyard. Last year a doctor warned of the danger of a polio or typhoid outbreak in the area. At the moment, work is going on at a blocked sewer pipe in Moyard, and many locals now feel that Moyard’s sewerage system has been destroyed by the British Army’s ‘security’ measures. In September 1981, a microbiologist discovered a bacteria count in stagnant water on the estate, approximating to pure sewerage.
Phil Molloy and Geoffrey Leslie present Gestetner duplicating machine to Maura Brown and John Brown of Springfhill Disabled Scheme, with Bill McStay (BBC)
Editorial
THIS week’s disclosure that children in the Six Counties are academically superior to children in the prosperous South of England, even with their public school system and greater facilities, shows once again what the Irish people are capable of when all the constraints and handicaps are removed.
That a British television channel should present this programme with what amounted to be an underlying sense of disbelief shows how much the British have become victims of their own propaganda.
For more than a decade now, they have been carrying out a savage vilification campaign against the Irish. The donkey jacket and wellington boots have become, to the dim-witted British, the national symbols of Ireland, where the people talk in riddles and fall victim to their own slow mindedness. These latest statistics should go some way to disabuse the British public of some of their more deep-rooted prejudices, and possibly even make them ponder on some of their own disabilities.
There are people who would say that all imperialist nations, who have ever robbed, raped and ravished their way through the world, and of which Britain is a prime example, have had one thing in common and that was a surfeit of slow-witted, compliant members of the population, who hadn’t got the intelligence to oppose the evil doings of their elitist leaders. Be that as it may, but one thing is sure, that Ireland has never had any imperialist ambitions. We have never proved a threat to any other country or nation, and this must go some way to prove the fundamental intelligence of its people.
Eamonn and Rosaleen McIlveen, John McKay and Brigid and Billy Moore at Michael Davitt's GAC Annual Dinner in the Hitchin' Post
Tenants of Brooke slam NIHE
RESIDENTS of the Brooke area are up in arms at the “incompetence” and “clumsiness” of the Housing Executive.
John Clarke, chairman of Brook Close Rive Close Tenants’ Committee has presented the Andersonstown News with a catalogue of complaints locals have made about the Executive’s rehabilitation work.
“Three years ago the Housing Executive told us we were to be rehabilitated,” said Mr Clark. “Had we known then the incompetence and upset we were to endure we would not have let it be started,” he added.
The tenants’ complaints are numerous and range from the more important such as the lack of footpaths in the area, to the less serious such as the continued absence of a lamp post, knocked down a year ago by a builder’s lorry.
Mr Clarke says the standard of rehabilitation work was “pathetic”.
“Kitchen units have fallen off walls since the work finished, tiled living room floors were ripped up and replaced with bare chipboard, while damp destroyed furniture which had been stored in an Executive portacabin during the refurbishing,” he said.
Michael Davitt's GAC Annual Dinner in the Hitchin' Post
