Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [201]
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It is revealing that Adair and his associates became terrorists partly to avoid the serious beatings that the UDA periodically delivered to delinquents, drug dealers and petty criminals. Adair himself subsequently set up a satellite group from Tigers Bay, consisting of local low life, or ‘Hallions’ in local argot, who one policeman remarked ‘would have shot their own mothers’. They were now licensed to dole out rough justice themselves. Beyond the bars and republican shebeens (illegal drinking dens) this was also a culture of the mean streets, whose respective kerbstones were painted red, white and blue or orange, white and green. Posters threatened informers or warned against careless talk in pubs that might be with an undercover British agent. In the countryside of South Armagh or Tyrone there were PIRA roadsigns warning ‘Sniper at Work’, especially after the PIRA acquired a few .50-calibre Barrett sniper rifles which have the same effect on the human body at three-quarters of a mile as a Magnum handgun fired from a few feet. Murals, or as they are known locally ‘muriels’, were an east Belfast Protestant folk-art form first seen in those areas in 1908. They invariably commemorated King Billy’s victory at the Boyne. It was not until the 1980s and the PIRA hunger strikes in the Maze that republicans decided to green the walls of ‘their’ ghettos aggressively, while the Irish tricolour appeared everywhere. Many of these images celebrated mythical Celtic figures, or intimidated and reassured the population with gigantic masked gunmen brandishing Armalites and AK-47s as old ladies grimly went about their shopping beneath them. The problem here was that the old ladies tended to idolise the murderers among them as nice wee boys who had gone a little off life’s rails. Commemorative plaques marked the deaths of volunteers and martyrs. Each side of the sectarian divide cashed in on political violence through souvenir shops selling a wide range of kitsch from commemorative mugs to fridge magnets—‘Proud to be a Prod’—and tea towels as well as tapes (and later CDs) of loyalist or republican music. There are coach tours for anyone too scared to trudge the Falls or Shankill past all those charmers who on a cold February day loiter in T-shirts and lycra shorts with Spiderman tattooed on their bulging calves.
Any terrorist campaign is reliant upon regularly stoking the embers of communal hatred, which in the case of PIRA extends to the huge Irish-American diaspora. The deaths of volunteers—whether killed by the army and RUC or by their own choice as hunger strikers—offered a prime opportunity to mobilise a sense of collective grief and victimhood as well as calls for revenge. Cemeteries like that at Milltown in Belfast’s Andersonstown district contained a Provo section with tombstones recalling the careers of dedicated martyrs, while a sentimental shrine has appeared recessed along the Falls Road. The day I visited the cemetery, middle-aged grannies were explaining republican history to toddlers and small children. Crowds of republican sympathisers made up the funeral cortège, with grieving family and friends holding up the coffin draped in the Irish flag. If the dead man or woman was important enough, Gerry Adams—with his bodyguard ‘Cleaky’ Clark—would be there to say a few words before beetling off in his armoured black taxi. Invariably after the religious rites, masked gunmen would step out from the crowd to fire a salvo over the grave, disappearing so quickly that it was impossible for the watching security services to do more than photograph them through telephoto lenses.
What terrorists mainly do is kill and maim people: ‘nutting’, ‘stiffing’ or ‘touching out’ in a local jargon that uses ‘digging’ for giving someone a beating with iron bars and baseball bats. The target chosen and the modus operandi are vital since they can bring esteem in the gang and wider community. Anyone so minded can shoot a person randomly on the street from a passing car. Ambushing Gerry Adams as he left Belfast magistrates