Weigh This Record

Only 16 days after I first mentioned the Nihangs below the line on UnHerd, it has noticed them, although it has still not noticed their use of cannabis to make them fiercer in battle. If the fragrant Lady Donaldson is unfit to stand trial, then what about Hadi Alodid? And while we continue to await either a COBRA meeting or the declaration of a national emergency either over Southampton or over Belfast, Sunday Life Investigations brings us this:

Knife attack victim Stephen Ogilvie — whose stabbing sparked two days of race-hate rioting — was previously tortured by a UVF-linked gang led by a double killer and overseen by a Shankill Butcher.

Loyalists explained how Ogilvie moved to Edinburgh more than 20 years ago after falling foul of paramilitaries in the Rathcoole estate in Newtownabbey.

Once across the Irish Sea, the 44-year-old was targeted by UVF killer Mark ‘Gutsy’ Campbell, who was the gunman who shot dead Protestants Cecil Dougherty and William Corrigan in 1994.

The victims were gunned down at a Newtownabbey building site having been mistaken for Catholics.

After being kneecapped by the UVF for this ‘error’, Campbell relocated to Scotland where he was joined by a group of pals including Stephen Ogilvie.

Campbell set up a heroin dealing gang which a court later heard claimed to be members of the UVF and had links to Shankill Butcher William Moore, who visited Edinburgh to oversee the racket.

Ogilvie was not part of this drug dealing group, or involved in criminality, but would sometimes be in Campbell’s company as he knew him from back home.

The mob spray-painted ‘UVF’ around the Broomhouse estate and dealt out vicious beatings to anyone who crossed them, including Ogilvie who was described as their “punchbag”.

Gang member David McCleave ended up being jailed for 14 years for spiking the Rathcoole man with a date rape drug and putting lit cigarettes between his toes.

Ogilvie was then stripped, beaten with a baton, had aftershave poured on him and then set on fire.

VULNERABLE

Gutsy Campbell also exploited him, with reports in Scotland revealing at the time how he was picked on because he was vulnerable.

The UVF killer cruelly nicknamed Ogilvie ‘Hokey Cokey’ because his hands fidgeted so much as a result of an earlier paramilitary hammer attack.

Ogilvie ended up returning to Northern Ireland after giving evidence against his tormentors, with six men jailed for more than 60 years.

In 2016 Campbell died of a drugs overdose while awaiting trial for the UVF murders of Catholics Gary Convie and Eamon Fox in 1994.

Ogilvie entered into a life of petty crime and when he last appeared in court in 2020 for assault on police and disorderly behaviour, it was revealed he has 161 convictions.

District Judge Fiona Bagnall remarked: “You weigh this record, you don’t read it.”

It was also revealed that Ogilvie is a diagnosed schizophrenic who was attempting to turn his life around.

Loyalist sources say the irony of paramilitaries using the attack on him as an excuse for race-hate rioting — given they had spent decades torturing him — is stark.

One told us: “Stephen Ogilvie had to leave Northern Ireland because of the UVF, he had his hands broken by them, and he was the victim of a torture attack in Scotland by a gang led by UVF gunman Gutsy Campbell.

“Now you have the UVF exploiting the stabbing and using it as an excuse to start riots in Newtownabbey and Belfast.

“The UVF couldn’t care less about Stephen Ogilvie, if it did it wouldn’t have forced him out of Northern Ireland in the first place, and Gutsy Camp­bell wouldn’t have had him tortured in Scotland.”

Stephen Ogilvie is now in a stable condition in hospital, recovering from the horrific wounds inflicted on him after he was stabbed multiple times in north Belfast last Monday.

Sudanese national Hadi Alodid (30) appeared in court two days later accused of attempted murder and possessing a knife.

Graphic footage of the attack on Ogilvie, showing him being stabbed multiple times, has been widely shared on social media.

The recording sparked two days of race-hate rioting in loyalist areas of Belfast and Newtownabbey.

WRECKED

Dozens of innocent foreign national families, many with young children who have lived in Northern Ireland for years, had their homes wrecked and burned by masked men.

Police were also attacked by thugs who tried to storm a hotel in Newtownabbey that has housed immigrants.

Despite a PSNI assessment that the rioting is not being organised by the UVF and UDA, known loyalist paramilitaries have been witnessed taking part. The gang’s leaders have also been deciding where any trouble takes place.

Sources say this is evidenced by the fact Carrickfergus escaped widespread violence after the UDA and UVF banned any trouble due to the town hosting Saturday’s annual Royal Landing pageant, which commemorates King William’s arrival in Ireland in 1690.

Loyalist sources say paramilitary chiefs did not want to see the place wrecked ahead of the well-attended festival, and troublemakers were instead told to go to Newtownabbey to riot.

A small number of teenagers ignored the order and threw masonry and a petrol bomb at police, however the trouble ended quickly.

In east Belfast, senior UVF figures encouraged rioting, a situation that was mirrored in the Woodvale, Tigers Bay and Crumlin Road areas where African nationals were burnt out of their homes.

Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson said: “At this stage we have no evidence to say that the violence is being coordinated by loyalist paramilitaries.”

Well, I mean, who in turn coordinates them? Meanwhile, over in the Other Side, “It is not unreasonable to suggest (as the IRSP do) that migration into Ireland generally and into working class communities in particular, must not occur in a fashion which is detrimental to the interests of the Irish working class itself.” It was grimly amusing to imagine Irish-Americans thinking that they were upping the ’RA by sending money that ended up in the hands of the UVF and its ilk. It is if anything even more to imagine that the ultimate destination might be the INLA. But might the IRSP be positioning itself as the voice of the anti-woke Left? It would have some work to do, but stranger things have happened. Now, since this has always slightly baffled me, where does that Costelloite tradition believe that sovereignty resided?