Johnny Adair - Paramilitary Activities

Paramilitary Activities

Upon joining the UDA in 1984 Adair and his friends were assigned to C8, an active unit that formed part of the West Belfast Brigade's C Company, which covered the lower Shankill. The young members early duties mostly consisted of rioting, along with occasional gun attacks on heavily armoured police vehicles or arson attacks on local businesses felt to be employing "too many" Catholics. The unit however was eager to become more active and from an early stage plotted to kill solicitor Pat Finucane although the plan was initially vetoed by the brigade leadership.

By the early 1990s, a new leadership had emerged on the Shankill Road following the killing of powerful South Belfast Brigadier and the UDA's Deputy Commander John McMichael in 1987 by a booby-trap car bomb planted by the IRA; less than three months later, the Supreme Commander Andy Tyrie resigned after an attempt was made on his life. He was not replaced; instead the organisation was run by its Inner Council. With the West Belfast UDA brigadier and spokesman Tommy Lyttle in prison and gradually eased out of the leadership, Adair, as the most ambitious of the "Young Turks", established himself as head of the UDA/UFF's "C Company", 2nd Battalion based on the Shankill. Adair formed a so-called "Dream Team" of active gunmen, with many of his friends from his former skinhead gang including Sam "Skelly" McCrory, Mo Courtney, "Fat" Jackie Thompson, and Donald Hodgen recruited into the unit.

Adair succeeded Jim Spence as brigadier in 1993 after Spence was imprisoned for extortion. When Adair was charged with terrorist offences in 1995, he admitted that he had been a UDA leader for three years up to 1994. During this time, Adair and his colleagues were involved in multiple and random murders of Catholic civilians, mostly carried out by a special killings unit led by Stevie "Top Gun" McKeag. At Adair's trial in 1995, the prosecuting lawyer said he was dedicated to his cause against those whom he "regarded as militant republicans – among whom he had lumped almost the entire Roman Catholic population". Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detectives believe his unit killed up to 40 people in this period. Adair once remarked to a Catholic journalist from the Republic of Ireland upon the discovery of her being Catholic, that normally Catholics travelled in the boot of his car. According to a press report in 2003, Adair was handed details of republican suspects by the Intelligence Corps, and was even invited for dinner with them in the early 1990s. In his autobiography, he claimed he was frequently passed information by sympathetic British army members, and that his own whereabouts were passed to republican paramilitaries by the RUC Special Branch, who, he claimed, hated him. As brigadier of the West Belfast UDA Adair was entitled to one of the six seats on the organisation's Inner Council and in this role Adair, who wanted to continue on the path of violence, clashed frequently with East Antrim brigadier Joe English, who advocated seeking a peace settlement.

The BBC described Adair as "the most controversial, high-profile and ubiquitous" of all the paramilitaries operating in Northern Ireland during this period.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army's Shankill Road Bombing of a fish shop in October 1993 was an attempt to assassinate Adair and the rest of the UDA's Belfast leadership in reprisal for attacks on Catholics. The IRA claimed that the office above the shop was regularly used by the UDA for meetings and one was due to take place shortly after the bomb exploded. The bomb went off early, killing one of the IRA men, Thomas Begley, and nine Protestant civilians. The UFF retaliated by carrying out the Greysteel massacre, a random attack on the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Londonderry, in which eight civilians, two of whom were Protestants, were killed. Adair has survived 13 assassination bids, most of which were carried out by the IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).