Johnny Adair - Early Life

Early Life

Adair was born into a Protestant loyalist family and raised in Belfast. He grew up on the Old Lodge Road, a now mostly demolished road linking the lower Shankill Road to the lower Oldpark area, a site of many sectarian clashes and riots during the Troubles. The son of Jimmy and Mabel Adair, he was the youngest of their seven children, his siblings being (in age order) Margaret, Mabel, Jeanie, Etta, Lizzie and Archie, who was later also a UDA member. Adair's father Jimmy, who had a reputation as a practical joker, had no involvement in loyalism and mainatined close friendships with a number of residents of the republican New Lodge area, where he was a member of the local homing pigeon society. He continued his membership even after his son had emerged as a leading loyalist. According to Ian S. Wood he had little parental supervision, and did not attend school regularly. However Hugh Jordan and David Lister insist that the Adairs were attentive and fairly strict parents who sent their children to Sunday school. As a child Adair attended Hemsworth Primary School close to his Old Lodge Road home where he was noted as an unremarkable student.

As he grew older Adair took to the streets, forming a skinhead street gang with a group of young loyalist friends, who "got involved initially in petty then increasingly violent crime". Members included Donald Hodgen, Sam "Skelly" McCrory, "Fat" Jackie Thompson, James and Herbie Millar. Adair, Hodgen, McCrory and Thompson were classmates at the Somerdale School on the Crumlin Road. Although the gang still officially attended school, they would frequently play truant, take a bus into the countryside and consume large quantities of cider.

The gang regularly congregated outside the Buffs Club on the corner of the Crumlin Road and Century Street, where their numbers were swollen by other young men from in and around the Shankill. Eventually, Adair started a Rock Against Communism-styled band called Offensive Weapon which openly espoused support for the National Front. As a 17 year old Adair began a relationship with Gina Crossan, three years his junior and herself a skinhead girl who at the time had shaved her head to leave only a tuft of hair at the front. The notoriety of the gang, which was part of a wider group in loyalist north and west Belfast known as the "NF Skinz" because of their support for the ideas of the National Front, gained widespread notoriety on 14 January 1981 when "Seig Heiling" members launched a brutal attack on anti-racist fans of The Specials and The Beat when the two bands played a concert at the Ulster Hall. This was followed in August 1983 by the so-called "Gluesniffers March", when 200 skinheads descended on Belfast City Hall determined to riot with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament members who were themselves holding a rally, with the march taking its name from the prevalence of solvent abuse among the skinheads. The gang was not sanctioned by the UDA leadership, and led to South Belfast brigadier John McMichael declaring that he wanted its members "run out of town". As a result while still in his teens, Adair was threatened with knee-capping by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) after assaulting an old age pensioner but was given the option of joining the UDA's young wing, the Ulster Young Militants, instead. He joined the Ulster Young Militants, and later the UDA – a legal loyalist paramilitary organisation which used the cover name "Ulster Freedom Fighters" (UFF) when it carried out killings.