It’s a Gas Racket

Council is trying to hush up a scand alous swindle. It is a swindle involving embezzlement of public funds by a Council employee and the sudden disappearance of two well-known local figures.

If this were merely the usual crooked scandal that corrupt Unionist local government throws up (like the thieving Derry Motor Taxation Officer) it would not be so bad@= it would be quite normal. But it is a swindle which is harming financially the completely innocent people of working class Drumnamoe Estate, Lurgan.

bills The affair surfaced last week when Lurgan Borough Council sent mountainous gas bills for gas central heating costs to scores of Drumnamoe tenants. Yet the local tenant's association can show that when the estate opened three years ago tenants signed tenancy agreements stating that on payment of 25/- per week over and above rent and rates householders could haye gas-fired central heating supplied. This arrangement continued for three years and then, suddenly, unexpected gas bills backdated to 1968 started arriving. Some were for as much as £70, £80 and, in one case, £145. The working class wage earn ers were flabbergasted as their tenancy agreements clearly stated that all the costs of the gas central heating were covered by the 25/weekly addition.

But just take a closer look at some of those involved in this attempt to swindle the Drumnamoe tenants. gan in 1968 when the estate opened. Carson claims he told tenants at that time of the possibility of a charge over and above the agreed 25/- per week should extra gas be used - and of the possibility of a refund should less be used. Yet nothing was heard of this for three years. Certainly no-one heard of any refunds. Meantime, however, Carson has hurriedly left town, his office-supplies business in chaos, with another man's wife. Behind him he left his own wife and child ren and sundry frantic business partners.

Take Council Housing Manager A.G.Waite. He too blew town leaving behing him a mysterious but sizable deficit in the Housing Account (which includes rents from the Drumnamoe houses). The deficit had to be made up somehow. But how? Beginning to see the light now? The gas-light?

No wonder the popular town clerk, William McCleary, resigned. It was too much to expect a man of integrity and proven decency to work in the middle of this corruption.

To end the story - in August 1970 the Drumnamoe tenants wrote to the Lurgan Borough Council pointing out the terms of their orginal agreements signed in the Carson-Waite era. So far there has been no reply from the Council. Why not? Is it taking all this time for the shifty financial sharks on the Council to concoct a story justifying their attempt to rob the workers of Drumnamoe in order to compensate for the swindling of the discredited absconders ?

To those apologists and slobbers in the NUMskulls or Alliance or Nationalist or Semi De tachued L.P, who claimed that 'class war' was | outdated, the latest actions of our blow. Anthony Barber (a gentleman with 'interests' in S.Africa) as Chancellor of the Exchequer produced the most class orientated "mini-budget! in 50 years. Asa lresult w orking ¢ class people have been dealt a vicious blow. No more Who benefits? Well, big industrialists, and anyone earning over £40 a week, for whom the 6d. off income tax is intended - if you get less than £40 a week (as 98% of the population do) you'll be even worse off than before, and the poorer you are the worse it is. Nothing on pensions, so another 10,000 old people will die this winter (at least)

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from cold or hunger - these are officially accepted figures ;

teachers Here in Belfast, the working class lave excluded from the City Hall and a bunch of car-owning gangsters, led by the clown Cairns, put up the | bus fares - and put £180 a year on many working class families bills. These people are the enemies of the working class - and it is they who have declared CLASS WAR, just as they have always done. They even can blatantly admit their thefts - last week Her Majesty's Treasury admitted that since 1925 it owed teachers the incredible sum of £1,000 million which is "the ex- . cess of contributions over the money paid out to teachers in pensions"

The state is a robber, and it robs

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‘SOV ernord must have been a severe |

free school milk, prescr seein charges up, dwatal charges up!