We look at the stories that were making the headlines in the Andersonstown News this week in 1985
Survey will show life and death in notorious Divis Flats
AN unprecedented survey into the effects of the Divis Flats environment on its residents will begin this Sunday. Volunteers from the Divis Joint Development Committee have prepared a comprehensive questionnaire with the help of researchers from the University of Ulster, and each family in the notorious flats complex will be asked to answer a series of questions.
The results, the committee say, will prove that living conditions in Divis are causing untold damage to the health of local people.
"Here in Divis we have some of the worst housing conditions in Western Europe with dampness, rat infestation, no playing space, blocked sewage pipes, asbestos hazards and dilapidated flats," said Joint Development Committee spokesman Frank Gillen.
"Nevertheless, the housing authorities are trying to play down the effects of these slum conditions on ordinary people's lives. We, believe the results of the housing survey will add to the demands by people from all walks of life for decent housing to be provided for Divis residents."
The questionnaire will be strictly confidential. Information gathered will be forwarded to statisticians at Coleraine University where it will be collated and eventually published. Mr Gillen said St Brendan's and Pound blocks at Divis would be the first covered in the survey. Each questionnaire would take up to an hour to complete, he said, and the final results of the survey would not be available until mid-1986.
Groups involved in the Divis Joint Development Committee include the DMs Residents' Association, the Divis Education Project, the Play Project and the Welfare Rights Project.
Editorial: Never forget the plight the Maguire family have endured
THE release of Mrs Annie Maguire from prison in England after ten long years of unjust incarceration has brought to an end one of the most tragic events in recent Irish history.
The entire Maguire family, along with some relatives and friends, were arrested, tried and convicted with not one shred of evidence against them. The savage vindictiveness of the English legal system snuffed out the life of an entire family without as much as a blink, to satisfy a crazed passion for revenge following the bombings in England in 1974. We don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this would not happen in any other country in the world in the present day, whether it be totalitarian, democratic or otherwise.
To carry away a mother, father and young children, incarcerate them in separate prisons in the full knowledge that they are innocent of any crime, can only be compared to the treatment meted out to minorities in Hitler's Germany. We can be sure that it is worse even than the injustice perpetrated on Nelson Mandela in South Africa, who has become something of a cause celebre of the so-called liberal press in England, which never once raised a voice in anger at what was happening in their own back yard to the Maguire family.
Their fate was worse even than the fate of the hundreds of prisoners of conscience adopted by Amnesty International. They have encapsulated in their own small family circle the mass expulsion to Hell or Connaught, the deportations to Australia and the coffin ships of the famine, and the many, many injustices perpetrated on the inhabitants of this small island of ours in the past.
Mr and Mrs Maguire and their family have suffered untold hardship because they happened to be Irish and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not only do they deserve a pardon but they deserve massive compensation for the injustices they experienced so that they may live out what life is left to them, in some form of peace and tranquillity.
Stop the show trials
MARIE Connolly, spokesperson for Relatives for Justice, in a statement today, said that Relatives for Justice held a picket outside Crumlin Road Courthouse on Tuesday in order to highlight the injustices of the supergrass system, to draw to the public attention that 31 men and women are presently on trial solely on the uncorroborated evidence of Harry Kirkpatrick and to show the prisoners that people on the outside do care about their plight.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH: The Relatives for Justice protest outside Crumlin Road Courthouse
“Relatives for Justice once again call on our Nationalist politicians and our Church leaders to speak out against the supergrass system especially not forgetting those who have already been convicted under this perversion of justice," said the statement.
Ms Connolly went on to attack what she described as the "complacency of the ordinary" media for not carrying any coverage of the trial and for refusing to carry any statements from the group or cover protests.
