Andersonstown News 14 Nov 97/2 of 2 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Part 2 of 2 -- Editorial -- LET THEM EAT GOLFBALLS' -- HURRY BACK HOME MARY -- New route for black taxis, but fares are set to increase -- New Lodge thumbs-down for IDB's 'Tiger economy' -- DOE under fire again as Trench Warfare 2 erupts ******************************************************************* Andersonstown News - Thursday, 14 November 1997 ******************************************************************* Editorial WE SAY Let's grasp for ourselves what others can't give Hoping against hope is something that we've become very good at over the years. Time without number we have said that the apparently laudable aim of getting nationalists and unionists around a table to thrash things out was actually a questionable goal. At this juncture, we would have to go further than that and say it was positively mistaken. At the outset of the talks, we all hoped that Castle Buildings would turn into some Stormont Shangri-La wherein unionists would gradually emerge from their soundproofed bunker and come to a realisation that listening and talking are beneficial and worthwhile - even at the same time as common sense was telling us that it was a forlorn hope. It has now become clear not only that David Trimble and his cohorts are every bit as unreasoning and intransigent as we had feared, but that the continuing charade of trying to engage them at Stormont is currently the single greatest threat to the ceasefire. Since the moment that Trimble sounded his 'Let's take on Sinn Fein' clarion call and led his troops into Stormont - flanked by the political representatives of the UDA and the UVF - the peace process has drifted so far away from the ordinary man and woman on the street as to become virtually non-existent. Far from injecting pace and purpose into the peace process, the talks are sucking the life out of it. Expectations that Hume, Adams, Trimble et al would by now have been getting down to the kind of nitty-gritty discussions that would have convinced those outside that positive forward steps were being taken are being daily ground into the ground by every new revelation of unionist arrogance and indifference at the talks and by the increasingly despairing cri de coeur coming from nationalist representatives. The bitter fact is that Trimble is winning hands down at Stormont and is meeting pitiful resistance from nationalist representatives who we would have expected to perform considerably better. Trimble is in there - he's 'at the talks', but in fact he's doing a better job of bringing them crashing down than Ian Paisley and Robert McCartney put together. In Stormont, the unionists routinely antagonise and humiliate other parties at the talks with the same impunity with which they bully the Women's Coalition at the Forum, except that the Women's Forum continued to make their voice heard - the response of nationalists at the talks is to follow junior unionist apparatchiks around the building trying to get them to say hello and shake hands. That is the last thing our people need. What we need is for someone to grip this peace process tightly, hold it up and tell us it's ours. What we need is some kind of co-ordinated campaign of action - on the streets, in the courts, wherever - that doesn't skirt around the issues of concern to the nationalist community but which rails with peaceful aggression against them and gives us the equality we demand in our own country. Don't just complain about job discrimination to Bob Cooper at the FEA - drag the discriminators through the courts and tell the world about it; don't complain about the RUC waving the Union Jack in our faces in our own streets - march and demand they take it down until they do; don't write letter after letter to Belfast City Council asking if it's okay to put up a street name in Irish - put it up and tell them it's our street; don't wait for David Trimble to agree to talk about the hundreds of young Irish men and women languishing in jails as hostages of the past - get out and let those holding the keys know that a new day calls for new thinking; don't wonder how great it would be to vote in Presidential or Dail elections - set up voting centres and deliver the boxes to Leinster House. Job discrimination, flags and symbols, policing, culture, our Irish identity: it's time for us to move on these things for ourselves, imaginatively and energetically, because if we wait until they're dealt with at a higher level, it would probably be best not to hold our breath. No opportunity should be lost to assert our demand for equality. This perilous vacuum in which we find ourselves suits the unionists down to the ground, of course, but if anything, it suits the British even more. The flimsy illusion of movement that the talks provides gives them the perfect excuse for doing nothing. Heavily armed British soldiers continue to saturate the streets; the break in the fighting is used to reinforce barracks and spy posts the length and breadth of the north; families pray in vain for the return of their loved ones from the jails; the economic blackspots - overwhelmingly nationalist - continue to feel the cold shoulder of officialdom; the RUC baton and brutalise peaceful protestors and shower plastic bullets on their heads. If this is peace, then it's not all it's cracked up to be. Initial encouraging noises by the colonial emissaries of New Labour have faded into desperately tired and horribly familiar old platitudes in which consent (unionist, naturally) is sacrosanct and the 'warring-tribes-nothing-to-do-with-us-Guv' insult is elevated to a central policy plank. The unchanging fact of the matter is that the British no more understand the nationalists of these six counties than they did the Zulus of Natal. Mo Mowlam exploited the overwhelming desire of the people here for peace and moved among the people of the Lower Ormeau and Garvaghy in a way that no Secretary of State has dared do for over 20 years; she listened and then she let the RUC loose on them. At least her colleague Lord Dubs is honest about it: "I just don't understand it, frankly," he says of Catholic poppy alienation. The time for hoping against hope is over. Let's not hope Trimble will sit down and listen and talk because he won't. Let's not hope that Mowlam will understand and act now because she doesn't and she won't. Let's instead do something positive that will ensure that we are finally comfortable and at ease in our place and our time. In doing so, we will find the real peace that has eluded us for too long and prove once and for all that violence has had its day. Lets grasp for ourselves what others can't give Smugness and arrogance are unsavoury traits at the best of times, but combine them with a dash of unaccountability and you have a very nasty brew indeed. The revelation this week that Positively Belfast - whose sole shareholder is the DoE - had squandered #3 million of public money on high-profile events like the Portrush Senior Open will have many cash-strapped community groups struggling to keep their lunch down. An already bitter pill is made even harder to swallow by the fact that Targeting Social Need areas were the main losers. But the three wise monkeys approach of the DoE to the news was almost as hard for some to take. It is no surprise to us that the DoE is more interested in hot air balloons and power boats than it is in helping hard-working groups in deprived areas make a better life for their communities. It will always be the case while government departments here are run by the unelected and the unelectable. DoE news is no great surprise" Our own history has been hard on lives young and old. Too hard. Hard on those who died and those left behind with only shattered dreams and poignant memories. We hope and pray, indeed we insist, that we have seen the last of violence. We demand the right to solve our problems by dialogue and the noble pursuit of dialogue." President Mary McAleese at her inauguration. Word to the Wise.... "The time has come when we must indict David Trimble, call him to the bar of public trial and remove him forever." --Ian Paisley speaking at a United Unionist rally. "For 20 years, John Hume has portrayed himself as the Martini man, willing to talk any time, any place, anywhere. In reality he never once tried to seriously engage with unionists." --The UUP's Peter Weir. ********************************************************* LET THEM EAT GOLFBALLS' The fiasco of Positively Belfast - the Government quango which wasted nearly #3m of public money on high-profile sports and arts events across Northern Ireland in the early 1990s - has caused many a curled lip across Belfast. How could public money be so easy to come by? The Auditor said, "bills for hospitality, even for large sums, gave no indication of who was entertained or for what purpose" and that "vouchers for sums covering hundreds of pounds included a compliments slip, a small scrap of paper, a pencilled note on a self-stick label, and a pencilled note on the back of an envelope". So how could all this happen? In 1991, the flamboyant Richard Needham, Minister for our economy, brought the Tall Ships race to Northern Ireland. A happy event for those who caught a glimpse of the graceful ships in Belfast Lough. However, in Stormont language the event became "widely regarded as one of the greatest cross-community sharings in the history of Northern Ireland." The next step for Needham was to call some of his pals and tell them to get more events like this into the North. The DoE admitted that the device of using a separate organisation was convenient because it was "better placed than Government to secure sponsorship". In other words potential sponsors, including the good old Tourist Board would be more easily cajoled into supporting Positively Belfast than supporting the Government itself. What an irony - the Tourist Board paying money to its own funder, the Government! A financial merry-go-round. So was it legal? No. The DoE had to go back to Parliament and even change the law retrospectively to secure authority to make some of the payments. VAT irregularities have already resulted in #119,000 tax being paid back. So was it moral? Of course not. The coup de grace for local community groups was that the money came from the Social Need Order which gives the government the legislative authority to fund regeneration projects in Belfast. As one New Lodge activist put it: "They took the money from the pockets of poverty to put in the pockets of the wealthy." So was it effective? Not very. Of course, there is a case that bringing high profile events to Northern Ireland will create spin-offs like bed nights in hotels, food, catering, and transport. But these wealthy visitors left little behind - and took away #350,000 of public money in golf prizes and appearance money. The money isn't going to be spent on the TSN areas. So, what can be done? Firstly, the Government should order an urgent review of its discredited Targetting Social Needs policy. NICVA's December 1996 report showed that the Tories weren't operating it with any vigour. The Labour Government claim that TSN will be a 'backcloth" to all its decisions but has yet to show that it has any teeth - or any real money attached to it. Secondly, the issue of democratic accountability needs to be revisitied. Why set up a front organisation when you have a raft of quangos already? Thirdly, is the concept of responsible risk. Of course you have to speculate to accumulate, but the Auditor found Positively Belfast undertook no risk assessments or economic appraisals for many events and made no judgement of likely success or failure. As the chair of Positively Belfast claimed in his defence "I was not accountable - I was just fronting the organisation." Anarchy or what? Fourthly, we need restitution. The Audit report six months ago on the Belfast Action Teams and Making Belfast Work allowed the outgoing Tory Government to throw the baby out with the bath water and slash MBW budgets. But in that case, it was the standard of administration which was being criticised and not the use to which the money was being put. In this case of Positively Belfast, it is both the quality of the paperwork and the purposes to which it was put. So let us now see the new Government reverse the cuts in MBW's budget. It must also end the misallocation of funds to elitist projects of as much value as the hot air in the balloons. Well, Mo? ******************************************************** HURRY BACK HOME MARY COMHGHAIRDEAS, A UACHTARAIN! The Andersonstown News sends warmest congratulations on behalf of our readers to President Mary McAleese on the occasion of her inauguration as the eighth President of Ireland Belfast is itching to roll out the red carpet to welcome home President Mary McAleese when she makes the keenly-awaited announcement that she's to visit the city of her birth. Unionist politicians may have warned President McAleese that they'll take a dim view of her travelling North, but the unanimous verdict in Ardoyne yesterday was that they can't wait for her to come home in triumph - and the sooner the better. A spokeswoman at the President's office in Aras an Uachtarain yesterday told the Andersonstown News that the President's immediate post-inauguration schedule was full for the next seven days - after that the Aras will begin work on filling the diary of a new President basking in the highest approval rating in the history of the office. But with her close family ties to Ireland's second city and a huge number of family, friends and admirers here, it's expected that she will be heading home before Christmas. "Let's hope she will be able to come back to Belfast soon," said Ardoyne man Patsy Braniff." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joy at maternity reprieve There's been a joyful reaction to the news - due to be made official later today - that the Royal Maternity Hospital has won a reprieve. Dr Joe Hendron, who battled tirelessly to save the hospital while he was West Belfast MP, said it was "magnificent news". He continued, "most of all the minister's decision is a victory for babies yet unborn who may be premature or suffering from serious congenital abnormalities." The West Belfast MP Gerry Adams also welcomed the announcement by health minister Tony Worthington. "It's a victory for common sense," he said. "I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to all those individuals, community groups, trade unions and maternity support groups who waged the successful campaign to save the maternity unit." Inez McCormack, regional secretary of the health service union Unison, said she was "delighted" by the development. "What we would like to see now are the voices from the Falls and the Shankill which saved the unit involved in the planning of the new service and the new maternity unit." ******************************************************* New route for black taxis, but fares are set to increase "We can no longer avoid having to put fares up," says association boss On the day when the West Belfast Taxi Association announced a further route to their growing service chairman, Jim Neeson, said the company has been forced into a fare increase. Describing the rise in fare as 'regrettable', he said it had been forced on the association due to a rise in the price of fuel, general running costs and an increase in motor tax PSV licence. "We have been trying to put this off since last May but we now have no choice because of the cost of keeping a taxi on the road these days," he said. "Our last increase in fare was in May 1996 and we hope that our passengers understand the reason for this latest increase. "We can no longer avoid having to put fares up." He revealed that the Ladybrook, Andersonstown, Whiterock, Turf Lodge and Glen Road services will rise by 5p to 70p, while Twinbrook, Lagmore and Poleglass will go up by 10p to 90p. Concessionary fares will remain 50p. And on the same day as the fare increase, Monday November 24th, the taxis will begin a new service to Sprucehill on the Glen Road. "The fare will be 75p and we hope the route will prove to be accessible for everyone who lives in that area," said Jim. And the West Belfast Taxi chief also appealed to disgruntled customers to get in touch with the association if they ever experience any problems when travelling on a black taxi. "All our taxis carry a fleet number on the windscreen and there is also a registration number. "If anybody has any problems with our service or one of our drivers take down his number and we will take it from there." New route for black taxis, but fares are set to increase" We can no longer avoid having to put fares up," says association boss ***************************************************** New Lodge thumbs-down for IDB's 'Tiger economy' A leading New Lodge community worker is seeking an urgent meeting with the Economy Minister Adam Ingram to discuss his plans for a #2m advance factory in North Belfast. And Terry O'Neill of the Star Neighbourhood Centre says residents of the New Lodge will be at "a distinct disadvantage" in seeking work at the new factory because access to it is from Tiger's Bay. "We were delighted when we heard that at long last the IDB was going to locate an advance factory in North Belfast but there was a tremendous sense of letdown when we were told the only entrance would be via Tiger's Bay. We're really gutted here. The area is crying out for investment but there's no reason why the entrance to this new factory couldn't be from Duncairn Gardens, an area accessible to both communities for it's just unrealistic to expect the nationalists of North Belfast to travel into the very heart of Tiger's Bay just to get to work." Terry O'Neill says he's baffled at the decision to locate the main entrance to the advance factory in Tiger's Bay. "Sadly, this may be a consequence of the complete lack of consultation with local people over this proposal. Neither we nor our elected representatives knew anything about this factory plan until we were briefed by the IDB just hours before the official announcement. If anyone from the IDB had spoken to us first, they would have been aware of the strong feeling locally on this issue. But then perhaps they didn't want to consult with nationalists at all." Announcing details of the #2m high-spec advance factory on Friday last, Economy Minister Adam Ingram said it would help attract new investment to North Belfast. "This development, the first IDB advance factory in North Belfast, reflects the Government's commitment to promote industry and expand job opportunities in this area of social need. IDB plans to build a high quality, high specification factory designed to attract inward investors seeking a facility of this type. A spokesperson for the IDB said they were aware of local concerns and were in consultation with the community. "Our door is always open to the community," the spokesperson added.New Lodge thumbs-down for IDBs Tiger economy' A leading New Lodge community worker is seeking an urgent meeting with the Economy Minister Adam Ingram to discuss his plans for a #2m advance factory in North Belfast. ******************************************************** DOE under fire again as Trench Warfare 2 erupts Now focus shifts to saving surrounding trees Green campaigners still furious after the DoE's decision to allow the demolition of the landmark West Belfast building Trench House have vowed to win a second battle they've dubbed Trench Warfare 2. The 187 trees that comprise the mature raised woodland at Trench House are now the backdrop not to the splendid old house, but to a pile of bricks and rubble. But now even the future of the Trench House trees has been thrown into doubt by the refusal of the DoE to slap a Tree Preservation Order on the site, despite having ordered a major tree survey and report on the site, which is to be home to the new St Genevieve's Girls' School. That DoE report describes the area as "exceptionally important, visually, to that part of Belfast" and goes on, "we believe that it is possible to preserve this area of woodland and consequently we strongly recommend that the woodland, tree groups and individual trees... be given the protection of a Tree Preservation Order." Terry Goldsmith, the West Belfast environmentalist who's applying for the Tree Preservation Order, said he and his colleagues are outraged by the department's decision to ignore the recommendations in their own report, but added that they're determined that the trees won't go the way of Trench House. "This DoE decision not to issue a TPO is completely unacceptable," he said yesterday. "The raised woodland is visible from the whole length of the Andersonstown Road where it acts as a focal point for those looking west. The trees also overlook the main arterial junctions of Finaghy Road North, the Shaws Road and the Stewartstown Road. The trees provide a green lung in an increasingly densely populated area of West Belfast and are home to a wide range of breeding bird life and other wildlife." Mr Goldsmith said that in the light of the demolition of the listed Trench House last month, an early move to protect the trees was absolutely essential. "In an interview in the Andersonstown News, Lord Dubs said Trench House had been vandalised because it was just sitting there," added Terry, "and he claimed that had more time been available his department might have been able to save it. Well, I can tell him that these trees are being vandalised nightly by the same people who wrecked Trench House. Instead of setting fire to the inside of Trench House, they're lighting bonfires underneath and against the trees. That's due in no small part to the absolutely open access there is to the site at present. If the will from the authorities to save the trees is there, then I'm telling them they had better start now." Now Terry has sent a letter to the environment minister Lord Dubs, urging him to review and reverse the decision not to grant TPOs for the Trench House trees. "It might help him in his deliberations if we were to point out that while only 20 TPOs have been implemented in the Belfast area, a comparable area in Edinburgh has 150. This is despite the fact that Belfast is the most under-wooded area in Europe and West Belfast is the most under-wooded part of the city. "No doubt Lord Dubs will welcome the opportunity to go some way towards making amends for the decision he says he regrets to remove Trench House from the West Belfast landscape. We await his response with interest." A spokesman for the DoE said: "Every single case is judged on its own merits. At this stage this group may need to contact the church to see what they intend to do with the trees. It all depends, it's very difficult to comment until we know what their plans are. They may want to keep trees to keep the school in a secluded area." ================================================================= 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-11.22.97-01:50:23-4656