Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing by Johnny Adair

Author:Johnny Adair [Adair, Johnny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781857829341
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2009-07-05T22:00:00+00:00

10

FACE TO FACE

The Shankill bomb was intended for me. If the IRA got any other members of the UDA, it was a bonus. Any civilian casualties would just have to be accepted. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time as far as the Provos were concerned. It was a massive gamble on shoddy intelligence and everybody lost. Even if the IRA are to be believed – that it wasn’t a naked sectarian attack – the fact is the device was planted on a busy high street on a Saturday afternoon. Two months before the explosion that killed nine innocent Protestants, I came face to face with one of the bombers.

Gina and I were making our way home from a trip to the shops with the kids when we stopped at a set of lights at Carlisle Circus. Seconds later, a car packed with five men came to a halt next to us. In the back was the IRA’s main man in north Belfast and among the other passengers was a young guy with bright-ginger hair and massive ears. Within seconds, the windows were down and a shouting match started. The IRA man was the only face I knew in their motor but he was saying little. It was the youngster in the front who was giving it all he had. Throughout the volley of abuse, he kept his hand up to his face with his fingers spread as wide as possible to hide his identity. Only when the lights turned green and he spat at me did I get a better look at him. I didn’t think anything of it and assumed he wanted to make sure I didn’t know who he was.

The IRA man went bleating to Oldpark police station straight away to make a complaint that I’d threatened to kill him when we were at the lights. Later that night, a C Company unit went to his sister’s place, which he was using as a safe house, and tried to force their way in. When it became clear it wasn’t going to happen, the building was peppered with gunfire.

At the rear of the address, the IRA men did a runner down an alley, straight into an army foot patrol. The soldiers thought they were under attack. When the senior IRA man came complaining for the second time in the night that he was being targeted, they fell about laughing.

His ginger sidekick was Thomas Begley, who on 23 October 1993 strolled into Frizzell’s fish shop and blew himself up when the device went off early. On the morning of the bomb, I walked into 275a Shankill Road, above the fish shop, to collect a visitor’s pass for the Maze. I was there no more than a couple of minutes before heading to see Skelly in prison. After the visit, I went to the Donegall Arms and that is where I first heard what had happened. All I got was half a story. A bomb had gone off on the Shankill and people were injured.

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