For years, the people of St Columb’s Wells annually painted and decorated with quasi religious regalia the outside walls of their little houses to mark the feast day and were foremost in the religious procession to the Church on the feast day. There was a street well to whose waters were attributed healing powers ; when it ran dry during the long hot summer of 1976, under cover of darkness, a pipe was furtively rigged to the mains and many the following day proclaimed it a miracle.
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There are some similarities in their early childhood and school days in Derry but the differences are much more remarkable. A policeman’s son, Coulter grew up in the modest comfort of a terraced house on the perimeter of what became Bogside in the late sixties ; Cassidy’s father was a successful publican who bought an elegant mansion , complete with tennis court, landscaped gardens and stables on the outskirts of the City. The purchase was controversial since the area was designated a Unionist fiefdom but crafty, old Cassidy bought it in a sealed auction.
Read more →The gerrymander of Derry City by the Unionists , with the support of the Stormont Government, was the prototype for sectarian control of the State; despite being 70% Catholic and Nationalist, through blatant manipulation of ward boundaries, the City remained under Unionist control
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