Donal MacIntyre

EXILED UDA leader Johnny Adair claims to have teamed up with a German neo-Nazi bomber to fund a home for children orphaned in war-torn Uganda.

Adair’s strange relationship with Nick Greger, a notorious far-right German skinhead who is barred from entering the UK, is to be chronicled in a documentary on Channel 5 on Tuesday. Donal MacIntyre, its presenter, interviewed Greger in Dresden prison, where he was being held on explosives and incitement charges.
 
In the film Greger, who was released on October 27, says he and his organisation regard Adair as their leader and they threaten violence to “sort out” UDA rivals who forced him out of Belfast last year.

Adair now lives in Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland, with a coterie of former loyalist terrorists, having been released from jail in January 2005. In an interview with The Sunday Times yesterday he praised Greger as “a good guy, a Protestant”.

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A TELEVISION documentary which details terror leader Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair’s life in exile will be "controversial", film maker Donal MacIntyre has promised.

The hour-long MacIntyre’s Underworld programme, entitled Mad Dog, will show the former Ulster Defence Association godfather settling in to life in Scotland.

He set up home in Troon after leaving Bolton last year following a troubled stay which saw him convicted of harassment and assaulting his wife.

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MacIntyre’s Underworld, Five
Jack the Ripper – The First Serial Killer: Revealed, Five

What if I told you that the subject of last night’s MacIntyre’s Underworld lives in a country house, wins prizes for growing leeks, is taking a kind of sabbatical in which he’s enjoying bringing up his sons, and makes fussy distinctions between words that previously had blurrily similar connotations? You might think Donal MacIntyre had gone up in the world and found a posh literary eccentric to celebrate.

But no. He’s as down and dirty as ever. His subject was Paddy Conroy, the Newcastle career criminal, who has an almost wholly impenetrable Geordie accent, a character marked by ferocious drive and cheeky triumphalism, and whose distinction of the night was between a gangster and a villain. It turns out the former is a loner who lives in his imagination and the latter is just an ordinary bloke making his way as best he can in a tough world. Guess which one our Paddy is.

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Five, 11pm

Every "TV personality" has at least one alliterative adjective that’s suitable for a family newspaper. (Plenty have adjectives that aren’t.) Thus Daring Donal takes to the streets of Newcastle with Paddy Conroy, a Geordie hardman. Conroy finds himself oddly impotent – he’s been released from prison on licence but has a couple of hitmen after him. He can do nothing but watch his step. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as he wears an eye patch. It gives him the look of Captain Pugwash, but as he’s been inside for kidnap and torture, we’ll leave the jokes there.

Tuesday November 21, 2006
Gareth McLean
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,1952994,00.html

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DONAL MACINTYRE SITS BEFORE me in his favourite coffee bar in Richmond, west London, stirring a cappuccino. We have just walked around the corner from his production office four flights up in a house overlooking Richmond Green. Only a camera on the door, pointing at callers, suggests anything other than an anonymous business façade.

MacIntyre assures me, with a smile, that the camera is not for him. He does, after all, share the building with such luminaries as Sir David Frost.

But he is, remember, the journalist who has built a high profile out of exposing dangerous criminals through investigative TV reporting. He named and shamed Nottingham’s most prominent drug dealer, Wayne Hardy, a decade ago, and in 1999 elicited more national news headlines when he went undercover as a football hooligan attached to Chelsea Football Club. The resulting broadcast led to two convictions and MacIntyre still bears the Chelsea tattoo he had inked on his left arm to convince fellow hooligans that he was a genuine Chelsea supporter.

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Investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre has become one of TV’s biggest personalities. Due to give a talk in Belfast soon, as part of the Cinemagic Film Festival, he tells Lucy Gollogly about exposing abuse in care homes, buying Semtex in the former Yugoslavia – and a controversial new documentary he’s made about Johnny Adair

You’ve done programmes for BBC One, BBC Two, ITV, Sky and Five and also have your own production company, Dare Films. You’re one of the most successful journalists to come out of Ireland. How did your career start?

I started off on a sports beat covering soccer, rugby and GAA matches in Co Kildare. These were school matches and so on – of very little consequence – that the papers wanted covered but wouldn’t send any of their staff to do. I inherited that some time after Eoghan Corry, a very esteemed sports journalist who wrote a biography on Barry McGuigan, left this post to work for the Sunday Tribune. Then my brother Darren took it on and eventually I got it. I then went on to work for the Sunday Tribune and the Irish Press, both in Dublin.

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Health Minister Paul Goggins has told the BBC he is deeply concerned about the eight-year delay in stopping a dentist, who has now been struck off for fraud and malpractice, from working in Northern Ireland.

Mr Goggins, in a statement to Tuesday night's Spotlight programme, has said he is going to review procedures which allowed rogue dentist Bruce Kelso to continue to work years after health officials began investigating him.

Spotlight reveals that Bruce Kelso was first quizzed by health authorities in NI as far back as 1993.

But after they found definitive evidence of fraud in 1997 – and then evidence of bad treatment – they did not manage to prevent him working until 2005.

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