On the livingroom wall in the Co Armagh home of David Adams hang photographs of him meeting Nelson Mandela and shaking hands with Bill Clinton.
The former loyalist paramilitary, who took part in the political negotiations that led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, points to his favourite photograph taken at an Ethiopian refugee camp during his work with Dublin aid agency Goal.
“My children call it ‘The Davy Wall’, sneeringly,” he says, laughing while petting his ageing dog, Walter.
Since retiring from the Dún Laoghaire-based agency seven years ago, Adams (72) has kept a relatively low profile.
RM Block
His profile was not always low. Adams was a senior figure within the Combined Loyalist Military Command, a group representing the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the Red Hand Commando; he was heavily involved in the negotiations that led to the 1994 loyalist ceasefire.
He is a former member of the UDA, although he was never convicted of any offences while a member of the paramilitary organisation. He was also a leading figure in the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), the political party linked to the UDA. His association with the group didn’t end well.
It is almost 20 years since Adams was put out of his home by the UDA for his involvement in the peace process – “my daughter is still triggered,” he says of the intimidation – and his life threatened when a gang climbed on the roof of his house and blocked up the chimney in the middle of the night.
“It was winter and we would often have banked the fire up at nights with coal and a bit of slack. That night we didn’t. If we had, we could have easily been killed in our beds, burnt or poisoned,” he says.
His pet dog, Oscar, was taken away and killed by paramilitaries.
The “last thing” his family wants is for him to have a public profile again, he adds. But an escalation in racist and sectarian attacks in Northern Ireland has had an effect on Adams.
The “lurch to the right” within loyalism – and links with far-right figures in the South – have also altered his thinking on where he believes the North’s future lies.
He says he feels compelled to speak out.
On the Tuesday morning he invites The Irish Times to his village home a short drive from Belfast, videos are circulating online of a group attacking individuals in a car park in east Belfast the previous evening. Later in the day, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) confirms it is investigating the incident as a race-related crime.
Catholic families being forced to flee a mixed social housing development on a Belfast interface where a UDA flag flies sparked an outcry the previous week.
[ The last Catholic family in a Belfast housing development plagued by intimidationOpens in new window ]
“Whenever I was away overseas with Goal, I could divorce myself from here and what was happening to a large extent,” he says. “When I came home, it was worse than what I’d left in 2005.
“It is absolutely depressing and what it does as well, it throws me back in my mind to the 1970s. We now have vigilantes on the street; their target is those with different skin colour and people of a different religion. So, it all has echoes of where we once were and what that led to.”
In the kitchen are painted handprints of one of five grandchildren; he mentions them repeatedly by name.
For the first time, he has reached a decision in the event of a referendum on a united Ireland. The criterion was simple: his grandchildren’s future.
“Negative” unionist leadership and growth in political support for what he brands “pound-shop Paisleys” preaching “self-serving” anti-migrant rhetoric were also a factor.
“My former position was, come a border poll – and it is inevitable somewhere down the line – that I would make up my mind then on where I thought the best future would lie for my grandchildren,” he says, of a potential vote on Irish unification.
“And I wouldn’t be swayed by tribalism or anything like that. I now believe that a ‘New Ireland’ is where the future lies, and has to lie.
“But I have to stress it has to be a new Ireland for all of us. It can’t be a replica of what was here obviously or what the Republic of Ireland was in the past.
“So there really does have to be that effort – and unionism, if it has any sense, should begin negotiations towards a new Ireland.”
He dislikes the term “united Ireland” because it’s “very nationalistic” and “suggests all we need to do is nail six [counties] on to 26 and everything will be fine”.
Any move towards Irish unity would require an acknowledgment from the Irish Government on how Protestants living in the South were “treated very badly” in the past, he insists.
“There were two minorities who were abandoned after partition. The Catholic minority up here, who were discriminated against – no two ways about that, terribly so. But ignored in every conversation about a future Ireland is, how the Protestant minority in the South fared.”
Republicanism also needs to take “a long hard look at itself”, adds Adams.
“I have friends in Sinn Féin, I have friends among ex-IRA people, I don’t want to be insulting them … I would just be worried about some of the rhetoric,” he says.
“It’s not about denigrating the other side to win plaudits from your own side.
“Sinn Féin have shown leadership within their own communities and have built self-confidence within their own communities – the right thing to do – but it can’t be at the expense of saying that ‘we’re better than them’.”
There are people he has spoken to in the unionist community who are at their “wits end” about what Northern Ireland has become, he adds, but do not publicly speak about a new Ireland.
[ Loyalism needs a new way forward – let’s start with the nameOpens in new window ]
Adams also says he is aware there may also be concerns in the South about the prospect of a border poll.
“We in the North, generally speaking, to people in the South are like that cousin who you would maybe go with to a Rangers-Celtic match, but you would never invite them to your wedding,” he says.
In expressing his support for Irish unity, Adams is the first former loyalist political leader and ex loyalist paramilitary to do so. He is quick to point out that he has “no friends within loyalism now”.
“When I was put out of the house, that cut all ties,” he says.
In 1994, he shared a platform with loyalist political leaders at Fernhill House in Belfast where foundingUVF member Gusty Spence announced the loyalist ceasefire.
Last June, Adams was among the speakers at a conference organised by pro-unity campaign group, Ireland’s Future, in which he called for greater reconciliation. DUP founding member Wallace Thompson, who has spoken of the inevitability of a border poll, and Leo Varadkar also attended the event.
That same month, Adams revealed his “shame” at his paramilitary past in an article published in this newspaper.
[ I am ashamed of my paramilitary past. I won’t be writing about it againOpens in new window ]
One of 10 children raised by nonsectarian parents in a mixed housing estate, Adams was grammar-school educated – his mother, a “devout Christian” taught him to read before he started primary school – and he admits there was “no reason” for him to join the UDA as a teenager.
Today, he expresses anger at the fact paramilitaries still exist.
The joint appointment by the Irish and British governments of an interlocutor, a role that will involve meeting loyalist and dissident republican paramilitary leaders in a move towards disbandment, is imminent.
“I wish that appointment the very best but I don’t have a terrible lot of confidence in it,” he adds.
“There’s also a part of me feels that we’ve more of a peace industry than a peace process now.”
Filling young people’s heads with Troubles’ “romanticism” is wrong, he says.
“I am ashamed of what I did. Joining the UDA was wrong, from start to finish. There was nothing romantic about it,” he says.
“It was dirty, filthy business that we all should be ashamed of. And you would think we would have learned about how dangerous it is to lay the foundations, as I think is happening now, for that sort of stuff to rise again.
“Oft-times, it’s about no more than winning votes.”
