66 Spencer Road, Derry-Londonderry – A Metaphor For Northern Ireland

If there was ever a metaphor for everything stupid about Northern Ireland, it is 66 Spencer Road in Derry-Londonderry.

From May 2015

The property has lain abandoned for many years now and is a local eyesore. Yet for reasons which could only be described at best as stupid, at worst as sinister, it is treated by the local Royal Mail like any normal occupied address.

How the property looked in May 2017

Despite this, it still has post delivered to it even though only the door and letterbox remain standing.

Again from May 2017

To no one’s surprise, all manner of sinister characters took full advantage of this mulish adherence to rules against all sanity to use it as a free drop box for items they didn’t want traced to their own front door – less cost or risk than Doddle or another P.O. Box provider where suspicious staff may contact the police, particularly for anyone ordering items over the dark web.

A quick move of the fence or a leap over the wall from the hill side was all it took to retrieve their goods.

Today

When the adjacent property (also derelict) was also demolished last year, strangely once more a door was left standing as per instructions. There was also a new twist when persons unknown screwed a mail box to this surviving front door.

As you can see, this is the sort able to take small parcels which once pushed in the top can only be retrieved by whoever has the key to open the box up fully.

The question is who is emptying it to ensure mail continues to be delivered to this address? What are they retrieving?

Strangely, these are questions the local authorities nor anyone else appear to be in any hurry to have answered.

The local Post Office claims it has a statutory duty to deliver mail if there is a correct address – but this is no excuse. The Postal Services Act 2011 sets out the minimum requirements the Universal Service Provider must deliver, and nowhere is there a compulsion for deliveries to be made to a clearly abandoned site.

Quite the opposite.

They are breaking the terms of their Universal Service Obligation (from which they have their contract allowing them to provide our national universal service for letters) whereupon all relevant postal operators are obliged to protect the integrity of mail by taking all reasonable steps to minimise the exposure of relevant postal items to the risk of loss, theft, damage and/or interference – including not shoving mail through clearly abandoned properties where they post a risk of attracting vermin and creating a fire hazard.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to guess the postal system is being deliberately abused for sinister purposes, and as those sinister purposes are likely to lead back to one of the various gangsters posing as politicians (the bane of Northern Ireland), nothing is being done about it or will be. In typical Northern Irish fashion, everyone’s pretending nothing amiss is going on so not to get involved (and perhaps kneecapped!)

It’s no surprise in such a nonsensical place the two biggest political parties – the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein – are allowed to continue to refuse to form a government yet are paid by the UK their wages in full for duties none carry out. Such is what passes for ‘rule’ in Northern Ireland, where thirty years of pretend civil war was replaced by twenty years of corruption tolerated by a combination of fear and reflex tribalism learned at the teat.

66 Spencer Road is a fitting monument to all which wilful stupidity can achieve – nothing but decay.