Adair followers face long exile

Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair’s exiled wife and his close associate John White must never be allowed back to Northern Ireland, loyalists said last night.

With at least two dozen of Adair’s paramilitary supporters also ordered out of the country under the threat of death from loyalist rivals, members of the Ulster Defence Association in Scotland, where Adair’s wife Gina and White fled, were urged to shut their doors on them.

They abandoned their homes and caught a ferry to Cairnryan on the Ayrshire coast, signalling the end of a two-and-a-half year reign of terror by Adair’s men in the lower Shankill area of Belfast.

Gina, their children, and White, his closest friend, were among a group which fled just hours before the showpiece paramilitary funeral of Adair’s rival John Gregg, the UDA boss in south east Antrim.