On This Day / September 10, 1971
Go BackReproduced with permission from The Irish News.
September 10, 2021
Publication Date
Listen Along in Éamons Voice *
Summary: On This Day – 10th September 1971, the anti-internment rents and rates strike escalated across Northern Ireland, while Paddy Devlin declared his opposition to returning to Stormont. Edited by Éamon Phoenix.
Rent Strike Escalates | On This Day – 10th September 1971
WITH the cost of the Nl rents and rates strike now reported to be nearing some £500,000, the Civil Rights Association declares that arrears will not be paid.
Instead, families are being advised to contribute the cash to the detainees’ dependants’ fund.
Troops remained on duty outside the NICRA office in Belfast while the conference was in progress and an Army photographer took pictures.
According to Mr Kevin Boyle of the NICRA Executive, in West Belfast 95 per cent of the 1500 families in the district are refusing to pay rents.
This represents a total rent loss of about £90,000 per week. In Ballymurphy, 1150 families (96 per cent of the local population) and in Turf Lodge, 1438 families (93 per cent) are on strike.
Rent collections have been suspended altogether in the Andersonstown area. Of the 1500 dwellings in the Divis Tower complex, 1460 are on strike.
The picture outside Belfast is similar and NICRA are confident that the majority of the anti-Unionist population living in public authority homes are now engaged in the strike.
Devlin on ‘Token Taigs’
THE Stormont parliamentary system will be ended regardless of how many ‘token Taigs’ emerged, declared Mr Paddy Devlin, SDLP MP for Falls in a bitter attack on the vice-chairman of the Alliance Party, Mr Oliver Napier.
Mr Napier had accused the SDLP earlier of steering straight towards civil war in the North by attempting to sabotage round table talks.
The SDLP politician said: ‘I personally had no interest, nor have my constituents, in going back to Stormont while internment lasts.
I am equally determined that this parliamentary system will end regardless of how many token Taigs flutter in the wind of change.’
Bomb Disposal Expert Killed
A BRITISH Army captain was killed yesterday when a bomb he was trying to defuse exploded outside an Orange Hall near Belfast.
He was Captain David Stewardson (29) from West Lothian. A married man, he had been in Nl for only ten days.
The bomb went off outside Castlerobin Orange Hall three miles from Lisburn. The IRA Provisionals in Dublin claimed responsibility for Captain Stewardson’s death.
(Éamon Phoenix editor’s note: The spread of the anti-internment civil disobedience campaign across the north was coupled with repeated declarations by SDLP and nationalist politicians that they ‘had done with Stormont’ in its traditional form of one-party unionist rule.
As more nationalists resigned from public bodies and the violence escalated, a Stormont official in the beleaguered Ministry of Community Relations asked his superiors in a memo: ‘Are we at war with the minority?’ Significantly, there was no reply.)
On This Day – 10th September 1971
Further Reading on Irish History:
List of other On This Day columns
Other resources: National Library of Ireland Irish News CAIN Archive
On This Day is a daily column in the Irish News looking back either 50 or 100 years. The column was compiled by Dr Éamon Phoenix from the mid 1980s until autumn, 2022. The Foundation is very grateful to the Irish News for giving permission to reproduce Eamon’s columns. Funding gratefully received from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and the Magill Trust.
* The Foundation has worked hard to recreate Eamon’s distinctive voice through AI. Since this is an emerging technology, occasional imperfections may be audible.