Hello, my name is Gerry Rice. My wife Gemma and I live outside the village of Drumaness at 11 Newcastle Road, Ballynahinch, in the heart of Co. Down in Ireland. We are both pensioners. I am recovering from a stroke suffered in December 2008 but, thankfully, I'm driving my car again. Our large family are now all grown up and away but Gemma and I still live in the old mobile school classroom we were forced into in August 1979 for our safety, because the Officials and Councillors in Down District Council refused to take responsibility for the shocking condition of our former five-year-old house which we purchased in June 1976 at 56 Carlisle Park, Ballynahinch.

No. 56 is the third of a block of four terraced houses, 52, 54, 56 and 58 Carlisle Park.
Council inspectors, N.H.B.C. staff and Stormont officials, who were responsible for awarding the building contractor a substantial subsidy, had passed our former home as being built according to the statutory laws at the time, only for us to discover that our house, as well as the other three houses in our block, was totally defectively and illegally built. As time went on we learned that this block of four defective houses was only the tip of an 'iceberg' of institutional corruption and fraud in Northern Ireland. With very few exceptions, our local Councillors, mostly Catholic and members of the Social, Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) on that Council, did nothing to try to force those Council officials who were and are responsible for this building fraud and/or its cover-up within Down District to do their duty and/or to have them prosecuted in a court of criminal law. All the Councillors seemed to be interested in was assisting their dishonest Council Officers in covering this fraud up from public scrutiny. Eight years into my campaign for justice, at the end of 1984, Down District Councillors did sack their Chief Building Control Inspector following what a local newspaper stated had been a limited Government enquiry.

In 1987 I began gathering up all my many papers on this sordid affair. I then typed out my story on an old typewriter. This task took up all my spare time over the next three years which was quite exhausting as it was done under the shadow of all our suffering. Over the next few years publishers in London, Dublin and Belfast refused to publish my story as a book.
In January 2000 I bought my first computer. I typed my story into the computer over a number of months while I was still recovering from being knocked down by a car in January 1998. I felt that this story had to be told and studied with the Open University to enable me to hand-code web pages and put my story on the internet. For legal reasons I have omitted some of the story and in the chapters I have included, I have deleted some place-names. Also for legal reasons I have changed the names of many real people involved in this story of corruption to names which are not connected in any way to any living person. Notwithstanding, I was taken for libel by "Mr. Big" and another councillor as related in Chapter 17 of my book which follows, and even though I 'wiped the floor' of the High Court in Belfast with their high-powered legal team causing them to pay off all the High Court's legal costs to prevent their own case going to trial, it is not an experience that I would recommend. These changed names are in italics. I have always tried to keep within the laws of this land in which I choose to live and I continue to do so here. Nevertheless I have ended up with a criminal record and I was also made bankrupt just because I chose to do what was right in the midst of so much wrong. Both these black marks against my character were wrongfully imposed upon me by Government agencies. My home was taken off me and sold, my thriving business decimated and because I relentlessly sought justice, people in authority here have tried, and are still trying, to make me out to be a crank. I have called my story:

Silence is Golden. Silence can bring peace of mind, silence can bring peace to the soul. The silence in my story however, is a totally different silence. This silence brings hurt, frustration, misery, pain, financial loss, mental abuse and much more. This silence is destructive. It is the silence that surrounds official wrong-doing, official injustice, official corruption, the silence that, if not checked and dealt with by the law, becomes institutionalised violence. It is the silence of bullies, corrupt people who have been exposed as cheats. It is the silence which is financially golden to cowards. This silence punishes the innocent in order to protect the guilty who in this case are also worldly powerful. I refused to accept this silence, I refused to be a part of this silence, and along with my wife and our children, I have been made to pay a very heavy price for that refusal. This is our story, a story that has gone on under the cover of the Troubles for over 34 years and is still ongoing. It is one of many such stories in Northern Ireland.