Since
its emergence as a cover name for the UDA in 1973,
the UFF and its first spokesperson, Captain Black
- believed to be a play on the name of UDA Shankill
Butcher John White - struck terror into the heart
of innocent Catholics. The 'guilty' Catholics -
those in the IRA - seemed to have little to fear
from the band of loyalist killers. The latter, until
the 1990s, rarely seemed capable of passing the
first Catholic they encountered. As few Catholics
were IRA volunteers it was statistically unlikely
that 'death at the hands of the UDA' would ever
appear on the headstones of those interred in the
republican plot at Milltown. In the case of Michael
Stone, finding himself in a situation where even
the blind could shoot IRA men, he managed to miss
all but one of them.
Although
Johnny Adair is said to have changed all of that
and boasts to have taken the war to the IRA, little
emerges from the book by Hugh Jordan and David Lister
detailing the activity of the Shankill loyalist
and his ‘C’ Company, that would add ballast
to such claims. Yes, his men did attack Sinn Fein
councillors and they fired rockets at Sinn Fein
property. But Adair’s most prolific murderer
Stevie 'Top Gun' McKeag, preyed only on the defenceless
innocent, on occasion taking ‘the war’
to a young mother working in a pharmacy, a Falls
Road barber, or elderly men in a bookies. 14 'kills'
and not an IRA volunteer amongst them. Hardly congruous
with the imagery of a disciplined military cadre
projected from the clipped martial language of a
‘measured military response’ that McKeag’s
bosses liked to employ as a euphemism for murdering
Catholics.
Looking
back on the first half of the 1990s, there is a
tendency to feel that there was a widespread UDA
campaign being launched with equal intensity from
a range of locations. But the ferocity with which
the onslaught was waged serves to disguise the fact
that the lion’s share of the killing was taken
by a relatively small number of people located in
a tiny geographical enclave. Although the book claims
that there was no evidence of security force collusion
at a senior level, many readers will find it impossible
to accept that. The Ballymurphy IRA, for example,
could not have killed as many people as the UDA’s
Shankill ‘C’ Company did and survived
as long. C Company only went out of business whenit
became a political imperative for the British state
to remove its leader. The evidence was always available
to convict Adair but was never pulled together until
it was deemed that his continuing presence on the
streets would constitute a threat to the developing
peace process.
There
are no dips in the pace of the narrative of this
sordid tale. Whatever else Johnny Adair can be accused
of, being dull will never appear on his rap sheet.
And the book should not be evaluated on grounds
other than what it purports to be. It is not a sociological
history or anthropological study of the Lower Shankill.
‘C’ Company is explained largely as a
personality driven entity. The pages come together
in a well-crafted journalistic account of a man
who wreaked havoc. It does not try to situate Adair
in any complex analytical framework. His world was
largely the area he grew up in and ultimately his
ego came to outgrow it. Johnny Adair, as an energetic
and enthusiastic sectarian killer, was certainly
involved in a political conflict but failed to bring
little in the way of political motivation to it.
His was a mixture of peer expectation, sectarian
hatred and the longing for an exalted status in
an impoverished community where other methods of
acquiring social standing were in as short supply
as social amenities. Political sophistication and
Johnny Adair were mutually exclusive. On the two
occasions that he met British secretaries of state
his political philosophy was encompassed in the
number of words used to express it - a grand total
of zilch.
Adair's
legacy is that he managed not only to destroy the
lives of many Catholics, he also left the Lower
Shankill a wasteland, where the veneer of painted
murals and roadside kerbs do little to conceal the
drab quality of life experienced by the people who
now live there. At a time when the Shankill Mirror
is being deluged with letters opposing any plans
he might have for returning to the Lower Shankill
on release, Lister and Jordan’s book helps
explain why.
As
Adair now sits in Maghaberry, most of his cronies
having deserted him, his son in prison and his wife
suffering from cancer, the big decision facing him
is whether it is worth the candle fighting to remain
a British drug dealer rather than an Irish one.
