Andersonstown News9-Oct-97/Pt.2 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Thu, 9 Oct 1997 19:12:38 -0400 (EDT) source:Beananti@aol.com Part 2/continued from Part 1 -- Dole Man's 50 Mass Cards prove his mother is death -- MAIRTMN S MUILLEOIR -- Squinter -- West Belfast mother and baby in hostel nightmare ************************************************ Andersonstown News - Thursday, 9 October 1997 ************************************************ Dole Man's 50 Mass Cards prove his mother is death Bereaved son's fury at DHSS's heartless action An unemployed Springfield Road man was forced to bring 50 mass cards and a newspaper death notice to the DHSS after they refused to believe him when he said his mother had died. The bizarre incident took place at the Falls Road dole office last week just days after John Clarkin had buried his 83-year-old mother, Mary Elizabeth. She passed away last Friday afternoon and was buried in the City Cemetery on Monday after 11.00am mass at Corpus Christi Church. After burying his mother, the distraught man called the Falls Road DHSS explaining that he was unable to sign on that day because of his mother's death. He was told to come in and sign on the next day, which he did. When John's cheque hadn't arrived by Thursday, he called the office and says he was told over the phone that the DHSS didn't believe his evidence. Next day, a furious John packed a bundle of mass cards and death notices into a plastic bag and dumped them on the desk of a DHSS official. John's cheque arrived next morning, but now he has returned the cheque, insisting that the DHSS deducts the relevant amount for the time he was unavailable for work. "If they had the sheer gall to tell me I was lying when I told them my own mother had died," he thundered, "then they're welcome to the pathetic amount of money they were trying to save themselves. I plopped the mass cards and the death notices on the counter and asked them if they thought that was enough, but they seemed more embarrassed than anything else. If this is the depths the DHSS has to sink to in order to save a few bob then God help us all." John says he's going to be writing to the DHSS demanding an explanation - and an apology. "It's disgusting to think that these people have effectively said that I would stoop so low as to pretend that my mother had died in order to diddle them out of a measly few quid," added John. "The more I think about it the angrier I get. It's already a difficult time and we're all trying to come to terms with my mother's death, but this sort of things makes it almost unbearable." No-one from the DHSS was available for comment this week. **************************************************** MAIRTMN S MUILLEOIR Howdy, pardner! To paraphrase the estate agent who said his three priorities in assessing home values are location, location and location, I'm of the opinion that the three most important tasks facing new nationalism in areas like Andersonstown, the New Lodge, Short Strand and the Market are jobs, jobs, and jobs. That's why I was privileged to attend the inaugural meeting on Tuesday of the newly-established West Belfast Partnership Board Economic Development Sub-Committee. Quite a mouthful that is too, but in fact the baby steps taken at that crucial first meeting could have a dramatic impact on all our lives as we enter the new millennium. Dickensian work practices at the electronic coalface in the Andersonstown News office meant that my input to the first meeting lasted only a few minutes before I dashed back to meet the demands of pressing deadlines. But that shouldn't be taken as any comment on the key role the Partnership is set to play in shaping the new West Belfast. At present, the Board is West Belfast's best-kept secret but all that's about to change when it opens new offices in a prime location in Andersonstown. It's then that we should see its ambitious plans to rejuvenate West Belfast start to take shape. But it's not only the nature of those plans which is important - a blueprint for more employment, improved training, an enhanced enviroment, adequate health services - but the fact that they are being put forward by one body speaking for all of West Belfast. The fact that so many diverse figures and bodies, some all but sworn enemies in the not too distant past, came together in the one board is a miracle which puts the spinning sun phenomenon of Waterfront Hall Greek fruitcake Vassula Ryden in the tupenny place. Not only do you have the SDLP and Sinn Fiin burying the hatchet to put West Belfast first but you have business interests weighing in behind the initiative as well. And we're not just talking about the hardy annuals, the small traders who have been the beating heart of the West Belfast economy for the past 30 years, but also heavy-hitters like Bob Magee, M.D. at Bass Ireland. The statutory authorities have also signed up to the Board and that means they're going to have to face some tough questions about their relationship to the taxpayers who pay their wages. How, for example, can the BELB justify barring all 13 of the city's Sinn Fiin councillors from its Board when unionists, some of whose education never passed reading bookies' dockets, are laying down the law to schools in nationalist areas. And LEDU will have to tell those of us who have been arguing for a greater local say in the regeneration of the West why we have to put up with unrepresentative bodies running some of the local enterprise centres. Who are the members of these boards? Who appointed them? Do they know anything about running small businesses? Are they picking up handsome annuities and expense cheques for turning up at the odd meeting with fellow-Board members who know nought about turnover and profits but could recite backwards from the Knights of Columbanus handbook. West Belfast is set to speak with one voice; it's time for those still operating to the old agenda of holier-than-thou exclusion to pee or get off the pot. ******************************************************** Squinter Keeping up appearances Squinter is at a loss to know what all the fuss is about the transfer of Scots killer Jason Campbell to Long Kesh at the behest of the PUP. You may be familiar with Jason's case: he cut the throat of 16-year-old Mark Scott in broad daylight on a Glasgow street for no other reason than the youngster was wearing a Celtic jersey. The PUP lobbied Secretary of State Mo Mowlam to have Jason transferred to the Kesh on the grounds that his father and uncle were both members of the UVF in Scotland. They also argued that Jason (23) has many friends in Belfast and is "well got" on the Shankill Road. This seems to make perfect sense to Squinter. After all, the UVF has been slashing, hacking, knifing, gouging, stabbing, battering, hanging, raping and shooting since 1966, and who can blame them for feeling a certain emotional attachment to a drunkard who's so handy with a blade around Catholic schoolboys? Squinter was chatting with the PUP just the other day about this very subject, and can report that the party's planning to have more prisoners transferred to Long Kesh. It's pressing particularly hard for the transfer of Knuckles McStravick, who's doing a 30-year stretch in the isolation facility at Broadmoor after London police found three heads in the fridge at his bedsit. Knuckles, Squinter is reliably informed, attended a Twelfth of July parade in Portadown once and has posters of the Pravince's main tourist attractions sellotaped to the foam walls in his cell. Then there's Chainsaw McClurg, who's in an SSDSU (Special Super- Duper Secure Unit) at Parkhurst. Details of McClurg's crime are scant as he pleaded guilty but insane, thus avoiding a lengthy trial, but it's known that the elderly couple didn't feel a thing because they were drugged and the hatchet was fairly sharp. Chainsaw's connections with the Pravince are many and well documented. He went to watch Northern Ireland playing England once at Wembley and got the boat to Belfast from Liverpool once but was recaptured. And negotiations are well advanced in the case of Spacer Gibson, currently heavily sedated in the psychiatric wing of Barlinnie Jail after a nasty incident in the TV room involving an E-tab and the prison cat. Spacer was sentenced to 12 years after being caught in possession of heroin with a street value of #350,000 hidden in the door panels of a 1979 Triumph Toledo with a GB bumper sticker and a street value of #75. The PUP says it intends to draw up a petition calling for the transfer of all these stepsons of Ulster, and Squinter intends to be among the first to sign it. After all, the party's only doing its best to protect the good name of the UVF. Do Christian Brothers deserve a bad press? This week's television documentary on the Christian Brothers wasn't entirely flattering, to say the least. Christian Brother-bashing is a popular sport these days, and the trendy view is that they are all sexually frustrated sadists with huge chips on their shoulders. That's true in some cases, of course, just as it's true with lay teachers. Squinter's experience with Christian Brothers at St Mary's on the Glen Road wasn't the medieval horror story of popular perception. Indeed, he's finding it hard to remember being whalloped by a bloke in a skirt. Good grief, come to think of it, he never was. But Squinter was unmercifully battered by lay teachers from a very tender age. There was a teacher in St Comgall's, God rest him despite his anger, who regularly lined up all 30 boys and strapped hands until he was completely shattered by his exertions. His nickname was Fishballs. Fishballs were a delicacy peculiar to St Comgall's: small lumps of white fish encased in a greasy, crispy batter. Fishballs (the teacher) used to open and close his mouth rapidly, like a fish in distress, while he was doling out his wrath. Another teacher at the same school not only had studs in his strap, but had made cuts at the end because he thought it hurt more. Blessed (now St.) Oliver Plunkett has the distinction of being the only school Squinter never got hit at - that's even though the current principal, Gerry Barrett, caught Squinter doing a big 'Z' (the mark of Zorro, no less) on a corridor wall. At St Mary's, Squinter was assaulted with depressing regularity by a series of lay teachers. An art teacher gave the 32 members of Squinter's class six on the back of each hand with a dowel rod (the most painful thumping Squinter ever got), a history teacher threw a duster at Squinter, missed, and hit the boy behind, leaving a bleeding three-inch gash; a French teacher used to lash out viciously with a cane - nothing unusual in that, except he hit his victims not on the palms but on the soft part of wrists where all the veins are (Squinter shudders to think of that one, even now). Compared to that lot, the Christian Brothers at St Mary's were a veritable collection of Padre Pios. There is none there any more, the teachers are all lay, so it's lucky for the present pupils that corporal punishment's a thing of the past. No vigilante heroics Squinter was one-handedly Hoovering the living room and giving the baby her bottle at the same time at teatime last Thursday when he heard the letterbox open and shut. No, stop. Let's start that again because you people are entitled to nothing but the truth and Squinter's fed up living this 'New Man' lie. Squinter was lying on the settee watching The Simpsons, reading the paper and drinking tea at teatime last Thursday when he heard the letterbox open and shut. He padded out to the hall in his sock soles and found an A4 sheet lying on the mat. 'Attention! Residents of Upper Andersonstown. Many people are concerned about the increasingly high levels of anti-social behaviour in the community and you have your chance to do something about it by attending a public meeting tonight at [venue deleted for security reasons]. The meeting will discuss the possibility of setting up a neighbourhood watch scheme. It's your community, and you can do something to make it better.' Squinter walked slowly back to the settee pondering this weighty burden that had suddenly been placed upon his shoulders. Neighbourhood watch group is, of course, post-conflictspeak for vigilantes, and vigilantes are notorious for many things, chiefly duffing people up. Inflicting pain on other people has never been Squinter's forte, mainly because he couldn't beat snow off a rope. Your correspondent learned very early in life that he who fights and runs away lives to run away another day and it is a maxim that he has assiduously lived by for all of his 36 years and he has devised many ways of avoiding potentially painful confrontations. Take large, broken-nosed persons in pubs, for instance. Most normal people, when bullied and harassed by thugs, will make some gesture of defiance - however pathetic - that will get them a tomato sauce moustache. Squinter finds that bursting into tears at the first hint of a raised voice disconcerts these men terribly. So the prospect of pursuing teenagers in baseball caps for some distance, then setting about them with a variety of wood and metal instruments is not an appealing one, it has to be said. Especially when it's three o'clock in the morning. That's not to say that Squinter wouldn't like to do all he can to make the streets safe for underage drinkers, far from it. Squinter sipped his tea and considered whether it mightn't be a good idea to go to the meeting and then leg it when they started getting macho. But squeezing out of the hall in the middle of 200 women while the vigilantes start drilling behind him is not an action which would necessarily endear Squinter to his neighbours. In the end, Squinter didn't go to the meeting and the Andytown vigilantes are going to have to go about their business without him, which is probably good news for them and bad news for the hoods. But who knows, maybe a few karate lessons or a Charles Atlas course would do the trick and Squinter can sign up next year for Vigilantes: the New Generation ******************************************************* West Belfast mother and baby in hostel nightmare A 19-year-old West Belfast mother and her nine-week-old baby daughter had to flee a hostel in the staunchly loyalist Old Warren estate in Lisburn after being subjected to a month of sectarian abuse in the street by local thugs. Now Martina Walsh has hit out at the Executive for placing her and little Rebecca in danger by sending her to a hostel in an area where a Catholic family is more likely to be attacked than welcomed. Ms Walsh says it's high time the Executive found her a home in an area where she and her child can feel safe. The teenager had been living with friends prior to being allocated a place in the Killaney Avenue Hostel in Old Warren. She says when she got the details of her temporary new home she didn't give it a second thought because she wasn't familiar with the area. "The Housing Executive definitely know that it's in a loyalist area, but they didn't tell me or else I would have said no," said Martina. "I suspected something wasn't quite right early on when a bottle was thrown at the taxi taking me to the hostel. After that, when I went out into the street all I got was 'Fenian bastard'. I stopped going out and got taxis everywhere, but it turned out that even taxi drivers from West Belfast were afraid to come here. I put up with it for as long as I could and then got out for the sake of us both." Martina's now back on the homeless list - she's living out of a suitcase with friends again and desperately hoping for some good news from the Executive. "It's no way to live when you've got a small baby to look after, but at least it's better than living in Old Warren, where I was afraid every night that something might happen. I haven't a clue what the Executive were playing at when they sent me there, but I hope they don't intend sending any more Catholics from West Belfast to Killaney Avenue, because it's a completely stupid thing to do and they're supposed to know what they're doing when they allocate somebody a place." This week the Housing Executive told the Andersonstown News that they were continuing in their efforts to find Martina a home. "Martina Walsh was temporarily rehoused by the Housing Executive in Killaney Avenue Hostel, Lisburn. The hostel is used to assist people who find themselves in a homeless situation. It was purely a temporary measure. The Executive tries to ensure the comfort of the residents, but where a problem occurs every effort is made to assist the individuals concerned. "Martina Walsh is on the Executive's priority waiting list for accommodation. She recently reported to the local district office that she had left the Killaney Avenue hostel and was making her own arrangements for temporary rehousing until an offer of permanent accommodation is made by the Executive." -fin- ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-10.10.97-02:27:23-15944