By ANNE McHARDY Herald correspondent
BELFAST - Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, the Loyalist paramilitary who was put back behind bars in Belfast yesterday on the instruction of Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson, is the outward manifestation of the complex and delicate relationship in Ulster between legitimate and terrorist politics.
Mandelson said he was suspending the licence under the Good Friday peace agreement that had freed self-confessed killer Adair, in the hope of ending the territorial battles between extremist Loyalist factions that have brought violence back to the working-class Protestant districts of East Belfast over the past week.
Adair, looking like a mirror image of the beer-swilling, Union Jack-sporting English football hooligans who brought mayhem to Europe during the European Cup two months ago, has been the public face of renewed violence since being released from the Maze prison three months ago.
He was one of the last paramilitary prisoners to get licence under the 1998 Good Friday deal.
During the Orange marching season disturbances at Drumcree, in County Down, in late June and early last month, Adair turned up from Belfast to rabble-rouse, prompting calls from Conservative MPs in London for his return to prison.
The time lag between their calls and Mandelson's action reflects a problem that Tories find hard to understand. Mainstream, violence-condemning Northern Ireland Unionists have used the likes of Adair to frighten the English and Northern Ireland Catholics since 1912.
Even the current Unionist leader and Northern Ireland First Minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble, has relationships with the working-class Loyalist paramilitaries that date at least to 1974 and the Loyalist Workers' Strike that brought down the last serious attempt at power-sharing government, the Sunningdale Executive.
Trimble was then deputy leader of the Vanguard Unionist Party, whose leader, William Craig, organised Black Shirt rallies to protest against civil liberties concessions to Catholics.
Trimble's ability to withstand attacks on his leadership from ultra-conservative Unionists is due in part to the fact that many politically active Loyalists in the Democratic Unionist Party and the Popular Unionist Party have supported the Good Friday Agreement more enthusiastically than the middle-class Protestants.
The threat of violence from the Loyalist paramilitaries has long been the factor that has persuaded successive British Secretaries of State to back off from confrontation with Unionism and to therefore repeatedly collapse proposed new self-governing institutions. The difference since Good Friday has been the loyalist refusal to be used.
If the inevitable protests over Adair's arrest can be confined to the toughest of Protestant districts, then the effect on the peace process may be contained.
The problem will be if Catholics join the fray or if Mandelson allows the British Army, returned unexpectedly to the streets, to over-react.
If Mandelson's judgment is sound, then the rioting could be just a fullstop to the summer of flag-waving and drum-banging.
'Mad Dog' the inspiration of renewed violence
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