Being seen with the High and Mighty!
SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie lives about four miles from where we live in our old mobile school classroom. (Continued below)
President Mary McAleese and her husband Martin with Dr. Tim Campbell (centre), director of the St. Patrick Centre, SDLP leader Margaret Ritchie, Down council chairman Eamonn O'Neill, Down Council Chief Executive John Dumigan and
Jack Ferris, chairman of the St. Patrick Centre board.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
We have been forced to live in this accommodation since 1979 simply because Down District Council refused to act to prevent a serious coal-smoke nuisance entering our former totally defective home in Ballynahinch from the house next door. To have taken the action necessary to safeguard our children and my wife and me, Down District Council would have exposed the massive housing fraud which the former East Down Rural District Council were responsible for assisting in managing, namely, allowing the whole load-bearing structures of an unidentified number of dwelling houses constructed during approximately a twenty-year period to be built with total rubbish instead of good solid bricks or concrete blocks. When Down District Council took over from the EDRDC, some members of the EDRDC transferred to Down District Council. Down District Councilllors then formulated their own laws regarding how people such as our family would be treated in order to cover-up this sordid affair. During her twenty-two years as a Councillor on Down District Council, Councillor Ritchie never called once to see how we were managing in our old mobile school classroom with such a large family, never joined with her fellow SDLP Councillor Carmel O'Boyle who worked so hard to try to get the Council to do something for us and, unlike Councillor O'Boyle, I am not aware of her ever having even brought our suffering up at one Council meeting during all that time. Incredibly, this has not prevented her from becoming leader of the Social, Democratic and Labour party. Of course I do not have the social clout of Mary or Martin McAleese!
