Republican News · Thursday 6 February 2002

Inside the mind of a Catholic killer

BY JIM GIBNEY

For John Gregg, a Catholic life was cheap and meaningless

The killing in the early hours of last Sunday morning of John 'Grug' Gregg' didn't just end the life of the man who almost killed Gerry Adams and a number of other republicans in Belfast in the mid-1980s.

It brought an end to the life of one of the crudest sectarian bigots to emerge from loyalist circles for many years - a man who had no regard for the life of a Catholic. To him a Catholic life was cheap and meaningless.

Indeed, to him any life was cheap if it was in any way associated with Catholics. That is the reason why a number of Protestants were killed by Grug's gang, based in the Rathcoole estate in north Belfast, in recent years. They were believed to be Catholics when they were killed.

It is no accident that the Catholic population of parts of north Belfast and east and north Antrim were in the eye of a sectarian storm for many years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. This was the area that Gregg was responsible for on the UDA's Inner Council. He was one of the six 'Brigadiers'.

He presided over a pogrom against the Catholic people using pipe bombs, petrol bombs, gun attacks and knife attacks. He was relentless. While other communities across the Six Counties enjoyed the benefits of the peace process, not so the Catholics who had the misfortune to live under Gregg's rule.

Gregg was one of the lesser-known UDA figures. He was often referred to in the media as the man who almost killed Gerry Adams. Occasionally we would see film footage of him speaking to the journalist Peter Taylor, while he was in gaol for shooting Gerry Adams, bemoaning the fact that he hadn't succeeded in his mission. This brief encounter told us little about this notorious Catholic killer.

However, Susan McKay, in her outstanding book 'Northern Protestants An Unsettled People', provides us with a rare insight into the mind of this bigot. In the course of research into her book, she met Gregg and spoke to him at some length.

She first met him in a loyalist-drinking club in Rathcoole called the Eastway. Despite his advanced age, he was the leader of a 'Kick the Pope' Orange band called the Cloughfern Young Defenders.

They often led marches to breach RUC lines at Drumcree, Dunloy and Derry to assert dominance over nationalists.

He told McKay that he voted for the Good Friday Agreement, "to see my friends get out of gaol", although he was ashamed for doing so. He couldn't stand PUP Assemby member Billy Hutchinson and described him as a "republican". Anything "lefty" was anathema to Gregg. He refused to join a trade union in the shipyard because he thought that a "republican sort of thing".

He and his supporters were "Billy Right minded" in every way, including killing Catholics.

He described his early days in the UDA's youth wing the 'Young Militants', which he joined when he was 14. He lied about his age, so keen was he to join. From the loyalist area of Tiger's Bay he would shoot into the nearby New Lodge Road, "just to blood you to get used to killing and being killed".

He described the experience as similar to being out on a foxhunt, where "they rub the blood of the fox on the cheeks of the kids to get them used to it".

His frequent trips to Scotland to see Rangers, which would cost him his life, often saw him getting requests for photos of 'Stoner' Michael Stone, another infamous Catholic killer, as well as locks of his hair. He thought this 'unbelievable'.

He welcomed support from the British National Front on the basis that they were "totally behind us" and carried "Ulster and Union flags and they loved us".

While in gaol, he had a pen pal in a South African prison. His nickname was 'White Wolf'. He was in gaol for killing blacks. Gregg said: "Basically he just murdered blacks. Someone was murdered in his family and he went on a full revenge mission. I could put it in the context of, if he was a Protestant, he would be like me, or like us."

He admired the Israelis and the white South Africans because they "are in a very similar situation to us".

He wore his sectarian bigotry on his body by covering it in loyalist tattoos glorifying the UFF.

Immersed for years in sectarian ideas and killing, it is hardly surprising that this ogre would turn his guns on other loyalists who he regarded as having stepping out of line.

Hours before his death, he told a Belfast journalist that there were graves to be filled and he would fill them with members of Johnny Adair's 'C' Company. But they got him first.

Gregg is not unusual in the world of loyalist paramilitaries. In fact he is very typical of the calibre of individual who emerges from this world.

Are the loyalists out of control? Not any more than they have been at many times in recent years.

To understand where we might end up I'll leave the last word to former UVF man Billy Mitchell, speaking in Susan McKay's book. He said: "When you incite people to form armies and then walk away, you create a monster and the monster does what it wants. Basically, I think Mary Shelley could have written Frankenstein about us."