Credit card pioneer had plans to create a new town in Northern Ireland in 1972
The visitors’ gullibility was underlined by their regurgitation of an urban myth about a Belfast Jew being quizzed as to whether he was “Catholic Jewish or Protestant Jewish?” A clearly frustrated civil servant noted in marginalia that it was time that this “apocryphal ... story was crucified dead & buried”.
A further challenge would arise in finding people willing not just to work across the community divide, but also to live side by side. Previous efforts at “community housing” had foundered on the pervading sectarian division within housing and this scheme’s remote chance of success would rest on selecting people “sufficiently immune from community pressures and influences not to be sucked into the vortex of recurring community strife”.
As such they were understandably concerned to discover that he was “an IRA activist in the old glory days”, if at pains to emphasise that he was “in no way involved” with republicanism since emigrating to the US after his release from prison in 1923 following the cessation of the Irish Civil War. Ambitious infrastructure projects feature elsewhere in this current release of historic files predating 1972. The recurring topic of constructing a physical transportation link between Northern Ireland and Scotland was discussed at length during the 1960s.
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