If any Catholics applied for gun licences he took his Fenian ledger out and checked their credentials. And that same Fenian ledger was to dictate who would be arrested the night Internment began years later. Even after Jonathan Adams was long dead the list of names he had prepared was still running through the British Army computers at check-points and border posts throughout the North. It sat on the desk of intelligence agents in London.

Each night during the fifties campaign he opened the ledger and added new names:

Flynn, Nevill. Roman Catholic.

B. 1932. Farmer. 14 head. Mixed marriage. Roman Catholic father, John. Mother, Church of Ireland, Dorothy. No prison record. Uncle, Robert Flynn, arrested after IRA raid on Beleek barracks. Eventually released without charge. Nevill Flynn suspected of storing arms. House searched four times in January, 1st, 22nd, 23rd, 31st. Nothing found, but library stocked with Nationalist literature. Refused to co-operate. Complained of ill-treatment by Special Officer Thompson. No basis. Sometimes drives a car registered in the South – ID 510. 42 acres. Lives at home. Neighbours convinced he is heavily involved. Stands while drunk provoking neighbours singing Republican songs out on the roadway. Believed to have torn down the Union Jack off a neighbour’s tree. Check with Special Officer Thompson about threat of “tearing his tonsils out”.

Description: A drunkard. High complexion. 5 foot 11 inches. Eyes blue. Mousey hair. Inclined to stammer. No special distinguishing marks. Perhaps easily led.

Possible.

Throughout those years the barracks were turned into sleeping quarters for B-specials, who came in drenched in the middle of the night and lay exhausted in cells next door to the men they’d arrested, interrogated, and beaten. The B-Specials were supposed to be part-time policemen, but were in fact a private army over which the police had little control. Many were Southern Protestants who came from over the border and were bereft of all the austere religious convictions of their Northern Brethren. They were green Orangemen. They drank wildly, used crude language and created mayhem, then left it to the ordinary police to clean up after them when they went back to their safe lives in the South.

When he let the Catholics out of their cells in the morning they complained in whispers about ill-treatment. Jonathan Adams neither spoke to them nor looked at them nor wrote anything down. They sought his attention, speaking to him in that beseeching tone of false innocence he so abhorred.

“What have ye to say about this?” he’d turn and ask the Special when the barrage had finished.

“It’s all lies,” came the reply.

“Do ye want me,” he asked the prisoner, again without looking at him, “to take your complaint in writing?”

“And be haunted?” The Nationalist would shake his head. “Away outa that.” Then Jonathan Adams would ask his name, address, age. This later, along with his observations, he’d add to the Fenian ledger. Next he took down the B-Specials’ reports.