Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing. Johnny Adair
Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing
was no hurry. I didn’t see the point in hanging on. If it was going to have to be done, it might as well be then and there.
In the theatre, I was given a local anaesthetic and so I was awake throughout the procedure. Although I couldn’t feel any pain, I could hear the medical instrument scraping my skull as the surgeon tried to get the bullet out. At one point, the medical team had to stop and give me another painkilling injection because the slug was deeper than they thought.
I saw the bullet when it was removed and dropped into a shiny silver dish. It was huge, a big lump of lead, and I was shocked. I knew my stuff and I’d guessed I’d been shot with a .22 round. This was way bigger than that. The doctor put it into a test tube and it was taken down to the police and we all had a look at it. Our best guess was that it was from a .38 and had been lying around getting damp since the Second World War.
When I got back to the Maze, I was sent for by the governor, who told me that he couldn’t believe the call when it came through from the hospital. A nurse had telephoned to say I was going to be late returning as I’d been shot in the head, but not to worry: I would be back. The governor didn’t know whether it was a wind-up or not.
The next concern was the backlash. The peace process being brokered by the British and Irish governments was at a delicate stage and the last thing the security services wanted was a witch-hunt. There were a number of reprisals without my knowledge but I called a halt to them as soon as I could. I met our spokesman, John White, and said, ‘I am alive, I have been through this before, and I don’t want the peace process wrecked.’
Word came through from the Republicans that the attack was nothing to do with them and I believed them. It was the best opportunity anyone ever had to kill me. He was firing from point-blank range and if it had been the Provisional IRA they wouldn’t have made a mess of it. Alternatively, they could have left a bomb under my car and blown me to bits.
The police were panicking and weren’t convinced that I wouldn’t let it escalate. The last thing they wanted was bodies turning up all over the city while the talks were going on. Two senior detectives came to question me in the Maze and let me know they had no evidence to suggest it was Republicans behind the hit. They were anxious to see what I was thinking about it, but I had no idea and told them so.
After showing me my beanie hat with the bullet hole in it, they asked me, ‘OK, what about Eddie? Do you know Eddie?’
My first thought was Eddie Copeland, a leading Republican activist in north Belfast, but again they insisted it was nothing to do with him. They were certain it was Catholic hoods who had seen an opportunity to kill me and given it a go. Did they have a weapon on them at the gig? Or did they spot me and send out and get one? I was there for hours, so they would have had the chance. Whoever it was had the nerve to get close to me and hold the gun in the middle of a packed concert. He knew what he was up to. Only one round was fired, but the guy knew that from close range this was all that was required. To have fired more would have given him less time to flee the scene.
The IRA murdered one of the main suspects. Ed McCoy was a 28-year-old drug dealer from the south of the city who was killed by IRA men masquerading as Direct Action Against Drugs. In May 2000, he was drinking in the pub with friends when two gunmen wearing false beards walked up behind him and shot him in the head and body. The gunmen’s getaway car was later found abandoned. McCoy was given a massive blood transfusion but died the next day. Other drug dealers that he had links to were also killed by the IRA.
The other name I was given came from a Catholic prisoner in Maghaberry. He came into my cell one day and threw down a newspaper that contained a memorial notice for someone called Whiteside. He was probably the guy who had shot me, and now he had committed suicide. His name meant little to me. I was just glad to be alive.
Violence was a way of life on the Shankill Road. Growing up there as a kid was like having the biggest and best playground right on your doorstep. There was always danger, always something happening, and that was what made it so exciting. I was born on Sunday, 27 October 1963, during a period when Northern Ireland was experiencing relative peace and stability. An IRA border campaign the previous year had disintegrated without getting very much support.
I was the seventh child of Mabel and Jimmy Adair. Our house off the Old Lodge Road in Belfast was right on the front line of the divided Protestant and Catholic communities, slap bang in the middle of what would descend into a war zone. West Belfast would remain my home until my family and I were forced to leave in 2003.
Like any other family in the area, we were poor. My parents, five sisters and one brother and me were all crammed into a traditional two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside toilet. Dad worked at the Ulster Timber Company on Duncrue Street in Belfast Docks, and did his best to feed his family and provide for us all. He was a very quiet man who didn’t drink or smoke, and there wasn’t a bitter bone in his body.
My family had no history of involvement with paramilitaries and there was certainly nothing there that hinted at the path I would later take. I firmly believe that if I had grown up anywhere but west Belfast I wouldn’t have got drawn into the Troubles and spent so many years behind bars, let alone become the leader of the UDA. Growing up on the Shankill wasn’t a normal childhood, but it was all I knew. There was no stage when I thought to myself, I want out of this place. Besides, we were a poor family, so where were we going to go? It was what I was born into and what I had to accept.
When I was very young, there was little of the vicious divide and hate-fuelled violence that would rip the area apart. The two communities lived side by side and I clearly remember playing with Catholic kids in the street when I was growing up. They lived alongside us and, as far I was aware, there was no difference between us.
All that changed during a week of violence in August 1969. Tensions had been bubbling under in Northern Ireland for most of the year. Leading Loyalists were unhappy with the liberal attitudes of the Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill. They believed that his policies were far too moderate, and they were going to do something about it. Forces within the Ulster Protestant Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteer Force collaborated to stage a series of bombings that were made to look like the work of the IRA.
In March of that same year, the Castlereagh electricity substation, which supplied power to the south and east parts of Belfast, had been blown up. The following month, water pipes in Dunadry in County Antrim, the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains and at Lough Neagh were all targeted. The city was brought to its knees and the IRA were getting the blame. O’Neill resigned, but it didn’t stop the trouble. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland were now on a collision course.
Trouble first erupted in Londonderry, where Harold Wilson’s Labour government had given the go-ahead for the annual Apprentice Boys’ march around the city walls on Tuesday, 12 August 1969. The march sparked two days of violence in the Catholic Bogside area of the city and, as word quickly spread, clashes flared up in Belfast.
The people on the Shankill began to feel they were under siege and that the IRA were coming to force them out of their homes. After seeing the trouble in Londonderry, the Irish Prime Minister, Jack Lynch, inflamed the situation in a television address by saying that action was needed and that a united Ireland was back on the cards. Within days, the two communities turned on each other. Rioting and looting left seven people dead. Protestants now knew they were under attack, and a backlash followed that led to Catholics being burned out of their homes.
Only five at the time, I understood very little about what was going on. I remember waking up and finding the street jammed full of police cars and fire engines as they attempted to deal with the mayhem from the night before. While I’d been asleep, a mob had gone to the homes of suspected Catholics and set them on fire. The kids I’d played football with were gone and their homes were still smouldering.
My age didn’t