Belfast in the spring of 1990 was no stranger to marches, rallies and disorder. Amid the ongoing Troubles, protest was an established feature of the city’s political landscape, with opposition to Margaret Thatcher and her government a recurring theme throughout the 1980s across the whole province of Northern Ireland.

Yet one demonstration from this period which remains largely overlooked is a campaign against a tax that Northern Ireland did not even have. On Saturday, May 19, 1990, around 100 people gathered at Central Hall in Rosemary Street to oppose Thatcher’s deeply unpopular Community Charge, more widely known as the Poll Tax. The apparent contradiction was difficult to miss, however. Northern Ireland had been excluded from the new system and there were no plans whatsoever to introduce it. Instead, the province continued to rely on domestic rates for local government finance.

Indeed, only weeks earlier, Northern Ireland’s continued reliance on the rating system was itself a sensitive issue within Thatcher’s government. In April 1990, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke proposed the first full revaluation of domestic and non-domestic property in the province since 1976. Brooke believed that such a revaluation would strengthen the Government’s case for the Community Charge elsewhere across the United Kingdom by demonstrating what he regarded as the unavoidable consequences of retaining the old rating system.

Despite his claims, though, Thatcher surprisingly resisted the proposal. With her so-called ‘flagship reform’ already engulfed in controversy throughout Britain, she was wary of the political implications of announcing a major rates........

© The Irish News