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When
the UDP would make an appearance at Stormont as part
of a delegation journalists would comment that it
was the turn of the Ulster Drugs Party to get more
high than mighty about some pressing issue. So, observing
Kevin Magee and the Spotlight team make their
way into the UDA’s Big Brother House in the Lower
Shankill estate I was eerily reminded of the Brazilian
journalist Tim Lopes who had ventured into one his
own country’s shantytowns in a bid to shed light
on the nefarious activities of drug dealers who infested
the poverty stricken neighbourhood. He never returned
and was later found hacked to death. With empires
to protect those who put them there can leave nasty
surprises for anyone willing to poke under the stones
upon which they are built. Magee came out to tell
the tale - and what viewing it made. He pulled few
punches and refused to confer respect on the ‘men
of honour’, calling them gangsters rather than
brigadiers.
This
was a story that needed told, even if it was to state
what we all knew already - that the UDA is a criminal
conspiracy willing to employ the brawn of the mafia
but considerably short on its brain. We have all heard
the joke about John Adair junior being shot because
the father found him reading a book. And as it says
on Johnny Adair's business card, “Ulster Freedom
Fighter. West Belfast 2nd Batilon. Ye ha. F.... the
ra”. Maybe Johnny just pronounces battalion with
a French accent, just as John White doesn't drink
or smoke, which helps make him the proud owner of
a 300 000 home, stables and a Jag. As a friend said
yesterday, maybe he doesn't smoke 5000 cigarettes
and doesn't drink twenty bottles of brandy each day,
putting the money he saves from such abstinence toward
paying his mortgage and HP.
A
couple of months ago myself and another republican
were on our way to North Belfast - his family doctor
is located there. He doesn't mind the journey and
likes to drive across the Shankill and through its
loyalist mural festooned lower end replete with painted
kerbstones just to see 'how the other half live.'
He was relaxed about it, slowing at one point or another
to look at a mural or to let a pedestrian across.
I was less concerned with how they lived, being preoccupied
with the fact that I wanted to continue to
live, and could not get through the place quickly
enough. On the drive down the Shankill Road I was
struck by the dilapidation of the area. It seemed
worse than our own, even if our streets are littered
with filth. The Falls Road at any rate exudes the
appearance of being more upmarket and vibrant. The
question crossed my mind if the more able were not
in fact leaving the Shankill rather than live under
the rule of the drug barons. There must be some correlation
between the prevalence of the narcotics gangs and
the level of deprivation. What quality of life can
develop under what Billy Hutchinson described as ‘Neanderthals
whose knuckles are trailing the ground’?
When
thieves fall out it is never that long before the
dirty linen too falls out of the bag. It is a matter
of regret that the public have to wait for the infighting
rather than gaining access to the inside track as
of right. Spotlight did an admirable job in
helping viewers join the dots linking one drug lord
to another in the foggy underworld of loyalist criminality.
Tapping into a rich vein in the growing fault line
dividing the West Belfast Ulster Drugs Association
from its other five criminal empires, Kevin Magee
and his colleagues permitted their audience to be
bombarded with allegation and counter allegation.
The accusations being hurled from one drug camp to
the next were remarkable for the unity of their discourse.
The ‘other side’ was involved in drugs,
criminality, work evasion, and scams. C Company lost
on points only because they ran a brothel to boot
- colourfully described by Sammy Duddy as a whore
house. Duddy may be grateful that he was not forced
to work in it as one of the ‘whores’ given
his previous life as a drag artist.
Spotlight
provided a valuable window into a seedy, sordid and
vicious world. However, as a friend told me over coffee
yesterday its one drawback was that it seemed to justify
the imprisonment of Adair while portraying the rest
of the ‘evil empire’ as somehow less deserving
of similar accommodation. A recent TV documentary
claimed that one of Adair’s opponents ordered
the murder of Gerard Lawlor. Who or what is being
appeased by his state approved recent return to the
streets of North Belfast? There seemed little reason
for the Spotlight team not to have pressed
PSNI Acting Assisting Chief Constable Maggie Harpo
Hunter more firmly on that. Are some murderers of
Catholic kids more useful to the state outside rather
than in the prisons in whatever strategic game of
'pass the druggie' it seems intent on playing with
the Ulster Drugs Association?
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