So why did these three prominent men, all ostensibly members of the Catholic Church like myself, ignore the pleas of the father of a large Catholic family in distress?

John Hume apologised for taking six weeks to acknowledge my first letter stating that he had been on holiday. Referring to the help I needed, Mr. Hume told me that he would be contacting 'his people' in Downpatrick right away and would get back to me after that. John Hume never did get back to me.

Given Mr. Hume's ready access to the most powerful people on Earth, his ready access to the finest minds on Earth and his obvious authoritative and commanding presence in the most prominent company on Earth the question has to be asked why Mr. Hume was stopped in his tracks by 'his people' within his own political party, especially when that political party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party of which Mr. Hume was the leader, actually had an outright majority on Down District Council for most of these past thirty one years. Who was powerful enough within his own party to silence Mr. Hume who was seeking to help me? Or maybe it was another and more powerful influence outside his political party which silenced him? It had to be someone or something of immense importance to silence a person of Mr. John Hume's international standing.


On November 29th 1976 I had phoned Down District Council and asked them, as the only authority with the appropriate power, to have the thick acrid smoke that was coming into our house from the attached house next door stopped. According to successive central Government ministers, only City, District and Borough Councils, including Down District Council, have the legal power to do this. My local Council, Down District Council, refused to take any action other than to cover up the problem.

The reason, as I found out in the following years, was simply. Had Down District Council provided my family with these services which I was forced by law to pay for in Rates payments, Down District Council would have had to take my neighbour to Court and force him to stop polluting my almost new home with smoke from the coal fire in his almost new home. The smoke came through what should have been, by law, a fire and smoke proof party wall dividing my neighbour's house from my house and my neighbour refused to stop it coming.
The danger that the Down District Council faced in taking my neighbour to Court was that if they did, they would have had to officially, legally and publicly admit and confirm that there was a need to take that action and it transpired in time that the 'need' in question was the fact the the wall between my neighbour's house and my house did not comply with the Housing Regulations under which these two houses were built. Yet the wall in question at this time was not only passed by Building Control inspectors employed by the former East Down Rural District Council, inspectors who were now employed by Down District Council, but it was also passed by the National House-Building Council and the Department at Stormont responsible for paying out grants to building contractors who had built their houses according to the law. Although the wall was passed as being built according to the law and a large amount of subsidy was supposedly paid to the builder for both houses on either side of the defective wall, this wall, however, was not built according to the law! In fact it transpired that every loadbearing wall and every dividing wall in these houses were built with the same rubbish. Of course all this defective building was covered up on the outside with walls built with good, legal and solid rustic bricks for all the world to see.

The following picture shows how this wall was 'built'.

The question again is, who and what caused a man of such international standing as Mr. Hume to be silent and remain silent to this day on what has turned out to be the biggest house-building fraud in this United Kingdom since it is now known that my house and the house next door are just two of many, many thousands of illegally built houses throughout Northern Ireland?

Did Mr. Hume submit to a plea from someone from within his own political party to stay silent no matter how much the Rice family were made to suffer? Surely not?

Was there really someone stronger than Mr. Hume within the SDLP?

Did Mr. Hume give in to a plea from the British government to stay silent to protect the Treasury from having to pay many millions of pounds in compensation if he assisted in exposing this massive fraud. I would have expected Mr. Hume to have had the moral courage to stand up to that authority as he had previously.

So what was it that caused Mr. Hume to stay silent on our suffering? Why did someone of Mr. Hume's standing go completely silent on a scandal which he obviously did not know about until he contacted 'his people' in Downpatrick, Co. Down, all those years ago? Who was Mr. Hume MP, MEP, prepared to protect for their wrongdoing instead of exposing that wrongdoing and helping to bring justice where there was injustice?

Most importantly, why did Mr. Hume MP, MEP, accept a Nobel Peace Prize with all its associated grandiose trimmings, when he willingly or unwillingly joined a ring of corruption to coverup a building scandal of immense proportions? The shocking injustice that Mr. Hume has assisted in prolonging has caused great suffering to my family. I am now 71 years of age, recovering from a stroke and have suffered from the disabling effects of agoraphobia since I was 19 years of age. My inability to recover from this latter disability has been in no small measure due to my inability to get justice. Mr. Hume especially, should know that the late Pope John Paul II stated in Ireland that where there is injustice there will never be true peace. How can Mr. Hume therefore accept a Nobel prize for peace when he is assisting in promoting injustice which destroys peace? This is the shocking disorder that is still Northern Ireland. The so-called 'Peace Process' is nothing but a sham, a lie and a charade.

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