Our Community has been Destroyed

Another letter to the Irish News

The last letter got published. Wahayyyyyy. It took a while and it was dumbed down a bit. I wonder if this one will be published.

Our community has been destroyed

Where have all my neighbours gone? “Holylands Student” 12/11/07 claims there are 400-500 residents. Where are they? Four years ago the Extern Organisation could only find 200. Between then and now that number has surely halved.

There are many pensioners here who have lived here all their lives and refuse to go. I admire their tenacity. However, almost all of the residents I know want out. They simply can't take it any more. Neither they nor their children can sleep at night due to noise in the street and through the walls. By any reasonable definition the extreme noise and sleep deprivation we experience here must constitute torture. Yet we cannot get rehoused. Those of us who don't own our homes, but are renting from the Housing Executive or Associations are prisoners here.

We can get no redress. The wardens privately admit that they cannot get the Universities to take meaningful action against their students. The police drive around and do nothing. They will not arrest or charge students. They will not even charge someone who invades a woman's home and climbs into her child's bed! For all the tough talk from the Universities things get worse every year. Their efforts do nothing to alleviate our torment, but they act as excellent “Perception Management” tools when dealing with the media.

Their sponsorship of a “Community Regeneration Association” (A UU initiative calling on the support of Extern) has worked wonders for their image, creating the impression that things are improving. It should come as no surprise that a former “Community Relations Officer” from the University of Ulster is now their chairperson. Anne Monaghan is repeating the same mantra she used when she openly represented the Universities,

“Get more residents into the area”.

This cannot and should not happen. There are 100 residents and 6000-7000 “students”, a ratio of at least 60-1.This community has been finished for many years. It was raped by landlords using Public Money and now the Universities have got a privately owned and privately run campus which is non-stop partyland.

My neighbours are queueing up to get out. Rehouse us and imprison no more people in this lunatic asylum.

We will see.