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Birth of Johnny Adair, Northern Irish Loyalist

Johnny Adair, leader of “C Company” of the Ulster Loyalist paramilitary organisation Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), a cover name of the Ulster Defence Association, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on October 27, 1963. He is known as Mad Dog. He is expelled from the organisation in 2002 following a violent power struggle. Since 2003, he, his family and a number of supporters have been forced to leave Northern Ireland by other loyalists.

Adair is born into a working class loyalist background and raised in Belfast. He grows up in the Lower Oldpark area, a site of many sectarian clashes during “The Troubles.” By all accounts, he has little parental supervision, and does not attend school regularly. He takes to the streets, forming a skinhead street gang with a group of young loyalist friends, who “got involved initially in petty, then increasingly violent crime.” Eventually, he starts a rock band called Offensive Weapon, which during performances espouses support for the British National Front.

While still in his teens, Adair joins the Ulster Young Militants (UYM), and later the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary organisation which also calls itself the Ulster Freedom Fighters.

By the early 1990s, Adair has established himself as head of the UDA/UFF’s “C Company” based on the Shankill Road. When he is charged with terrorist offences in 1995, he admits that he had been a UDA commander for three years up to 1994. During this time, he and his colleagues are involved in multiple and random murders of Catholic civilians. At his trial in 1995, the prosecuting lawyer says he is dedicated to his cause against those whom he “regarded as militant republicans – among whom he had lumped almost the entire Roman Catholic population.” Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detectives believe his unit killed up to 40 people during this period.

Adair once remarks to a Catholic journalist from the Republic of Ireland upon the discovery of her being Catholic, that normally Catholics travel in the boot of his car. According to a press report in 2003, he is handed details of republican suspects by British Army intelligence, and is even invited for dinner in the early 1990s. In his autobiography, he claims he was frequently passed information by sympathetic British Army members, while his own whereabouts were passed to republican paramilitaries by the RUC Special Branch, who, he claims, hated him.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of a fish shop on the Shankill Road in October 1993 is an attempt to assassinate Adair and the rest of the UDA’s Belfast leadership in reprisal for attacks on Catholics. The IRA claims that the office above the shop is regularly used by the UDA for meetings and one is due to take place shortly after the bomb is set to explode. The bomb goes off early, killing one IRA man, Thomas Begley, and nine Protestant civilians. The UFF retaliates with a random attack on the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, County Londonderry, which kills eight civilians, two of whom are Protestants. Adair survives 13 assassination attempts, most of which are carried out by the IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).

During this time, undercover officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary record months of discussions with Adair, in which he boasts of his activities, producing enough evidence to charge him with directing terrorism. He is convicted and sentenced to 16 years in HM Prison Maze. In prison, according to some reports, he sells drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy tablets and amphetamines to other loyalist prisoners, earning him an income of £5000 a week.

In January 1998, Adair is one of five loyalist prisoners visited in the prison by British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam. She persuades them to drop their objection to their political representatives continuing the talks that leads to the Good Friday Agreement in April. In 1999, he is released early as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners after the Agreement.

Following his release, much of Adair’s activities are bound up with violent internecine feuds within the UDA and between the UDA and other loyalist paramilitary groupings. The motivation for such violence is sometimes difficult to piece together. It involves a combination of political differences over the loyalist ceasefires, rivalry between loyalists over control of territory and competition over the proceeds of organised crime.

In 1999, shortly after his release from prison, Adair is shot at and grazed in the head by a bullet at a UB40 concert in Belfast. He blames the shooting on republicans, but it is thought that rival loyalists are to blame.

In August 2000, Adair is again mildly injured by a pipe bomb he is transporting in a car. He again attempts to blame the incident on an attack by republicans, but this claim is widely discounted. A feud breaks out at the time between the UDA and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) leaving several loyalists dead. As a result of Adair’s involvement in the violence, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson, revokes his early release and returns him to prison.

In May 2002, Adair is released from prison again. Once free, he is a key part of an effort to forge stronger ties between the UDA/UFF and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), a small breakaway faction of the UVF loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland. The most open declaration of this is a joint mural depicting Adair’s UDA “C company” and the LVF. Other elements in the UDA/UFF strongly resist these movements, which they see as an attempt by Adair to win external support in a bid to take over the leadership of the UDA. Some UDA members dislike his overt association with the drugs trade, with which the LVF are even more heavily involved. A loyalist feud begins, and ends with several men dead and scores evicted from their homes.

On September 25, 2002, Adair is expelled from the UDA/UFF along with close associate John White, and the organisation almost splits as Adair tries to woo influential leaders such as Andre Shoukri, who are initially sympathetic to him. There are attempts on Adair’s and White’s lives.

Adair returns to prison in January 2003, when his early release licence is revoked by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Paul Murphy, on grounds of engaging in unlawful activity. On February 1, 2003, UDA divisional leader John Gregg is shot dead along with another UDA member, Rab Carson, on returning from a Rangers F.C. match in Glasgow. The killing is widely blamed on Adair’s C Company as Gregg is one of those who organised his expulsion from the UDA. Five days later, on February 6, about twenty Adair supporters, including White, flee their homes for Scotland, widely seen as a response to severe intimidation.

Adair is released from prison again on January 10, 2005. He immediately leaves Northern Ireland and joins his family in Bolton, Lancashire, where it is claimed he stays with supporters of Combat 18 and the Racial Volunteer Force.

The police in Bolton question Adair’s wife, Gina, about her involvement in the drugs trade, and his son, nicknamed both “Mad Pup” and “Daft Dog,” is charged with selling crack cocaine and heroin. Adair is arrested and fined for assault and threatening behaviour in September 2005. He had married Gina Crossan, his partner for many years and the mother of his four children, at HM Prison Maze on February 21, 1997. She is three years Adair’s junior and grew up in the same Lower Oldpark neighbourhood. 

After being released, Adair is almost immediately arrested again for violently assaulting Gina, who suffers from ovarian cancer. Since this episode he reportedly moves to Scotland, living in Troon in Ayrshire.

In May 2006, Adair reportedly receives £100,000 from John Blake publishers for a ghost-written autobiography.

In November 2006, the UK’s Five television channel transmits an observational documentary on Adair made by Dare Films.

Adair appears in a documentary made by Donal MacIntyre and screened in 2007. The focus of the film centers around Adair and another supposedly reformed character, a Neo-Nazi from Germany called Nick Greger, and their trip to Uganda to build an orphanage. Adair is seen to fire rifles, stating it is the first time he has done so without wearing gloves. He also admits to being “worried sick” and “pure sick with worry” after Greger disappears in Uganda for days on end. It turns out that he had gone off and married a Ugandan lady. Adair confesses via telephone that he “thought something might have happened to Nick.”

On July 20, 2015, three Irish republicans, Antoin Duffy, Martin Hughes and Paul Sands, are found guilty of planning to murder Adair and Sam McCrory. Charges against one of the accused in the trial are dropped on July 1.

On September 10, 2016, Adair’s son, Jonathan Jr., is found dead in Troon, aged 32. He dies from an accidental overdose while celebrating the day after his release from prison for motoring offences. He had been in and out of prison since the family fled Northern Ireland. He served a five-year sentence for dealing heroin and crack cocaine. The year before, he had been cleared of a gun raid at a party and in 2012 is the target of a failed bomb plot. He was also facing trial later that year on drugs charges.

In December 2023, while recording a podcast with far-right activist Tommy Robinson, Adair surprisingly expresses a grudging respect for the IRA hunger strikers, describing the manner of their deaths as “dedication at the highest level” for a political cause and admitting that he would not have volunteered to do the same if asked.


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Birth of Teresa Kearney, Teacher, Franciscan Sister & Missionary

Teresa Kearney, better known as Mother Kevin, a teacher, Franciscan Sister, and missionary who founds a new Franciscan order, is born in Knockenrahan, Arklow, County Wicklow, on April 28, 1875.

Kearney is the third daughter of farmer Michael Kearney and Teresa Kearney. Three months prior to her birth, her father dies in an accident. Following his death, her mother remarries and has three more children. When she is ten years old, her mother dies. Her maternal grandmother, Grannie Grenell, then raises her in Curranstown, County Wicklow. Grannie Grenell has a profound impact on her spiritual beliefs and deep faith. When she is 17, Grannie Grenell dies.

Kearney attends the local convent school in Arklow following her mother’s death. In 1889, following her grandmother’s death, she goes to convent of Mercy at Rathdrum, to train as an assistant teacher. She does not have the finances to pay for training, and becomes a Junior Assistant Mistress. A year later, she goes to teach in a school run by the Sisters of Charity in Essex.

Following the death of her grandmother, Kearney turns toward thoughts of religious life. She believes that God is calling her to be a sister, and she applies for admission to the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Five Wounds at Mill Hill, London. In 1895, she enters the St. Mary’s Abbey, Mill Hill. On April 21, 1898 she takes the name Sister Mary Kevin of the Sacred Passion. Her motto is “For Thee, Lord.” She volunteers to work with African Americans in London. She waits three years for a posting to the American mission, but when the call from a foreign mission comes, it comes from Africa.

On December 3, 1902, Kearney and five other sisters leave London for Nsambya, Uganda. They are chosen at the request of Bishop Henry Hanlon of the Mill Hill Fathers. The sisters arrive on January 15, 1903 and establish a dispensary and school in the Buganda. Their task is to care for the women and girls and to further weaken the association of Catholicism with French missionaries and Protestantism with British missionaries in the then British Protectorate. Among the sisters are three Irish, one American, one English, and one Scottish woman.

Kearney starts her first clinic under a mango tree near the convent. The first seven years of missionary work are tough for the sisters. Various diseases, from smallpox to malaria, ravage Buganda. The infant mortality rate is also relatively high due to the high frequency of maternal deaths. In 1906, she expands the missionary and sets up a hospital in Nagalama, twenty-three miles away. She is appointed the new superior of the convent following Sister Paul’s illness and return to the United States in 1910. In 1913, three more sisters arrive, which allows her to establish a third mission station in Kamuli, Busoga. All three stations focus on medicine and education for the local population with a focus on primary and secondary education, training of nurses, and the founding of clinics, hospitals and orphanages.

During World War I, the Nsambya Hospital is used to treat the Native Carrier Corp, porters for European troops. At times, Kearney is outraged by the treatment Europeans give to the African porters. She works to uphold the rights of African people caught up in the European war. On December 25, 1918 she is awarded the Member of Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the wounded during the war years.

Kearney is credited for promoting higher education in Catholic African women in her mission. In 1923, she founds the Little Sisters of St. Francis, a community of African nuns for teaching and nursing. This program starts with only eight local girls. A year later, she and Dr. Evelyn Connolly, a lay missionary, found a nursing and midwifery school in Nsambya. Their goal is to promote the education of women throughout Uganda.

In September 1928, Kearney returns to England to establish a novitiate exclusively for training sisters for African missions. The novitiate is officially opened in 1929 in Holme Hall, Yorkshire. Many women from England, Scotland and Ireland travel to Holme Hall to assist the missionary efforts. This creates a shortage for the Mill Hill Fathers, who also need sisters for their school in England and American missions. Upon realization of this divide, Kearney and the Mill Hill Fathers break off from each other. On June 9, 1952 she founds the new congregation of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa. She is appointed the first superior general. Mount Oliver, Dundalk, becomes the motherhouse for this new congregation. With the formation of the FMSA, she expands the missionary work to Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, the United States, Scotland, and South Africa.

Kearney retires in 1955 at age 80. During retirement, she is appointed Superior of a convent in Boston, Massachusetts and raises funds for African projects. She travels and talks to donors to garner support for projects in Africa.

On October 17, 1957, Kearney dies at the age of 82 in Brighton, Massachusetts. Her remains are flown to Ireland and buried at Mount Oliver. Ugandan Catholics rally to have her body flown to Uganda to be buried. On December 3, 1957, her body is buried in the cemetery at Nkokonjeru, the motherhouse of the Little Sisters of St. Francis.

Kearney’s legacy is evident today. In Uganda, the word Kevina means “hospital” or “charitable institute.” The Mother Kevin Postgraduate Medical School is named after her. The Little Sisters of St. Francis has over 500 members throughout Africa, while the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa currently works in Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.


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Birth of Edel Quinn, Roman Catholic Lay Missionary

Edel Mary Quinn, Roman Catholic lay missionary and Envoy of the Legion of Mary to East Africa, is born in Castlemagner, County Cork, on September 14, 1907.

Quinn is the eldest child of bank official Charles Quinn and Louisa Burke Browne of County Clare. She is a great-granddaughter of William Quinn, a native of County Tyrone who settled in Tuam to build St. Mary’s Cathedral.

During Quinn’s childhood, her father’s career brought the family to various towns in Ireland, including Tralee, County Kerry, where a plaque is unveiled in May 2009 at Bank of Ireland House in Denny Street commemorating her residence there between 1921 and 1924. She attends the Presentation Convent in the town between 1921-1925.

Quinn feels a call to religious life at a young age. She wishes to join the Poor Clares but is prevented by advanced tuberculosis. After spending eighteen months in a sanatorium, her condition unchanged, she decides to become active in the Legion of Mary, which she joins in Dublin at the age of 20. She gives herself completely to its work in the form of helping the poor in the slums of Dublin.

In 1936, at the age of 29 and dying of tuberculosis, Quinn becomes a Legion of Mary Envoy, a very active missionary to East and Central Africa, departing in December 1936 for Mombasa. She settles in Nairobi having been told by Bishop Heffernan that this is the most convenient base for her work. By the outbreak of World War II, she is working as far off as Dar es Salaam and Mauritius. In 1941, she is admitted to a sanatorium near Johannesburg. Fighting her illness, in seven and a half years she establishes hundreds of Legion branches and councils in today’s Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, and Mauritius. John Joseph “J.J.” McCarthy, later Bishop of Zanzibar and Archbishop of Nairobi, writes of her:

“Miss Quinn is an extraordinary individual; courageous, zealous and optimistic. She wanders around in a dilapidated Ford, having for sole companion an African driver. When she returns home, she will be qualified to speak about the Missions and Missionaries, having really more experience than any single Missionary I know.”

All this time Quinn’s health is never good, and in 1943 she takes a turn for the worse, dying in Nairobi, Kenya of tuberculosis on May 12, 1944. She is buried there in the Missionaries’ Cemetery.

The cause for her beatification is introduced in 1956. She is declared venerable by Pope John Paul II on December 15, 1994, since when the campaign for her beatification has continued.


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Birth of Author & Journalist Mary Kenny

mary-kenny

Mary Kenny, Irish author, broadcaster, playwright and journalist, is born in Dublin on April 4, 1944. She is a frequent columnist for the Irish Independent and is a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM). She has modified the radical ideas of her past but not rejected feminist principles.

Kenny grows up in Sandymount and is expelled from convent school at age 16. She begins working at the London Evening Standard in 1966 on the Londoner’s Diary, later as a general feature writer, and is woman’s editor of The Irish Press in the early 1970s.

Kenny is one of the founding members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. Although the group has no formal structure of officials, she is often seen as the “ringleader” of the group. In March 1971, as part of an action by the IWLM, she walks out of Haddington Road church after the Archbishop of Dublin‘s pastoral is read out from the pulpit, confirming that “any contraceptive act is always wrong,” saying “this is Church dictatorship.” In a follow-up letter to The Irish Times she explains her actions by saying Ian Paisley was right, “Home Rule is Rome Rule.”

In 1971, Kenny travels with Nell McCafferty, June Levine and other Irish feminists on the so-called “Contraceptive Train” from Dublin to Belfast to buy condoms, then illegal within the Republic of Ireland. Later that year she returns to London as Features Editor of the Evening Standard.

In 1973, Kenny is allegedly “disturbed in the arms of a former cabinet minister of President Obote of Uganda during a party,” which leads poet James Fenton to coin the euphemism “Ugandan discussions” to mean sexual intercourse. The phrase is first used by the magazine Private Eye on March 9, 1973, but has been widely used since then and is included by the BBC in a list of “The 10 most scandalous euphemisms” in 2013.

Kenny has written for many British and Irish broadsheet newspapers, including the Irish Independent, The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator and has authored books on William Joyce and Catholicism in Ireland. She also writes for the weekly The Irish Catholic. She is known in the UK as a Roman Catholic journalist. Crown and Shamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy (2009), is described by R.F. Foster as “characteristically breezy, racy and insightful.” She is author of the play Allegiance, in which Mel Smith plays Winston Churchill and Michael Fassbender plays Michael Collins, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006.

Kenny marries journalist and writer Richard West in 1974, and the couple raises two children, Patrick West and Ed West, both journalists.