DUP take credit for council successesand blame others for failures

The £9 million valuation of Ballymacoss Hill was based on the site being sold for social housing and it specifically mentions that 30 of the units were earmarked for sale. There is no law precluding the Council from selling to whomsoever it desires. It is the planners who determine what will be built on the site and under PPS 8 such space can be used for development:- ‘5.5 The Department will permit an exception to the presumption against loss of open space where development would produce such community benefit that this would decisively outweigh its loss. In such cases, applicants will generally be expected to demonstrate that their proposals are supported by the local community.’

Permission may well have been given for a mix of starter homes and buy-to-let homes as well as social housing but we will never know because the DUP insisted on a sale to one preferred party and it has spectacularly backfired and Committee chairman Councillor Leathem must accept responsibility.

The truth is that recent rates increases would have been above inflation had it not been for the expansion of the rates base in the boom years which the DUP enjoyed and yet we have so little to show for it. Add the millions of pounds of damage caused to Lisburn by DUP ministers and our rates should have been significantly slashed.

Councillor Leathem was once a member of the UUP and left to join the anti-agreement DUP Mk1. It then became the pro-agreement DUP MK 2, so Councillor Leathem has in effect been in one more ‘party’ than me. Secondly I will take no lectures from him on social housing. The DUP are keen to present themselves as the great defenders of the working class, but how many of them have actually lived in social housing for 24 years as I have done?

His claims to promote unionist unity are totally bogus. This pact was not sought until after Aldermen Poots and Donaldson left the Council and he wanted a truce because he realised the DUP emperor had no clothes left.

My only “crime” was to respond to an invitation by the Mayor to put my proposals for reducing the rates in writing and Councillor Leathem has totally over-reacted. Faced with the weekly closure of our local businesses, Councillor Leathem has nothing to say.

‘Lisburn North Voter’ is clearly not an impartial observer. I was photographed in the Star recently with the residents of Lady Wallace Drive, helping them in their fight against a proposed nursing home. A meeting with NITH which I sought to seek extra car parking spaces at Lisburn Station in order to reduce off street parking in Lisburn North was reported. I led a delegation to see the Minister in relation to the Fort Hill planning problem at which all three UUP members for the area were present yet we find the DUP arranging a meeting with local residents to which we were not invited, giving the lie to any suggestion the DUP is interested in anyone other than themselves.

Councillor Ronnie Crawford