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By Root 900 0

of them, like Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, in reality a late developer in the matter of shooting people, overcame his slight stature—he was known as ‘the wee man’ before he became ‘Mad Dog’—building outwards by injecting his arms and thighs with horse steroids and pumping-iron sessions. He used the popular household aerosol furniture polish Mr Sheen to make his shaven head shine.

The urban Provos tended to affect denim jeans and leather jackets, when they were not trying to blend into a covering occupation that required a conventional suit-and-tie appearance. Alex Reid, the Redemptorist priest who played a key role in locking Adams into a peace process, forsook his black robes for a black leather jacket and jeans so as to fit in with his interlocutors. The South Armagh ‘Slabs’ looked like farmers everywhere in the UK with their checked shirts, gumboots, waxed jackets and flat caps. They also practised a low peasant cunning, calling off operations at the slightest suspicion that something might go awry, which made them harder to detect than the more volatile urban loyalist variety whose loud mouths in pubs were like a neon sign saying ‘arrest me’. The PIRA units in South Armagh were notoriously difficult to combat as they had the advantage of knowing every bend in the road, bush or culvert. While many loyalist and republican terrorists acted in a drink-fuelled rage, it is important to recall that former PIRA leader and current deputy first minister Martin McGuinness does not smoke or drink and fly-fishes in his spare time. His colleague, Gerry Kelly, who served a long period in jail for bombing the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard in the 1970s, has the gravely austere manner of a Jesuit priest.39 The same was true of Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright, leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), also a teetotal non-smoker whose pronounced evangelical beliefs meant that unlike many of his loyalist comrades he rarely swore. Many loyalists seem to have felt most at home in Scotland, where they went to support Glasgow Rangers—the Protestant antipode to the city’s Catholic Celtic. Indeed, they would like to extend the Anglo-Scottish border westwards. They flirted with English neo-Fascists, but as there were few Blacks in Northern Ireland they found the obsessive racism unfamiliar, although that did not stop them persecuting the local Chinese. Some PIRA terrorists were enthusiastic proponents of Gaelic culture, which they regard as indigenous to their island, its language relying heavily on an archaising Celtic script. A younger generation was just as likely to support English football teams, or to listen to Anglo-Irish-US rock groups like the Eagles, as to avowedly Provo bands such as the Flying Columns (whose name harks back to early IRA formations). In addition to the dirge-like plangent lamentations dedicated to long-dead martyrs like Wolfe Tone or Padraig Pearse, there was also a heavily politicised pop music for those who sought it. As Wolfhound’s song ‘Little Armalite’ has it:

Sure brave RUC man came up into our street

Six hundred British soldiers were gathered around his feet

‘Come out, you cowardly Fenians’ said he, ‘Come out and fight!’

But he cried ‘I’m only joking’ when he heard my Armalite.

Over on the other side, Adair’s UFF C Company evolved out of a skinhead ‘Oi’ band. Having started as admirers of north London’s Madness—a 1980s ska band—they graduated to the National Front-supporting Skrewdriver before founding their own combo called Offensive Weapon. Adair played bass guitar. Concerts were an excuse to sniff a lot of glue and to hurl oneself around until a major brawl broke out. The lyrics are instructive:

I like breaking arms and legs

Snapping spines and wringing necks

Now I’ll knife you in the back

Kick your bones until they crack

[chorus] Evil, evil, evil, evil [x 4]

Jump up and down upon your head

Kick you around until you are dead

Fill your body full of lead

See the roads turn red

[chorus]

I don’t like trendy cunts who pose

Gonna punch you in the nose

Stick my Marten [boot] in your crotch

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