shootings against the entire Catholic community in Northern Ireland, particularly in North and West Belfast. In one case a mentally impaired Catholic man was beaten to death by a Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang. However, Nationalist politicians such as SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon pointed out that loyalist paramilitaries had been carrying out indiscriminate sectarian murders long before the emergence of the Hume-Adams talks. The relentless attacks upon the Catholic community in Belfast led to grassroots pressure upon the IRA to retaliate; the IRA was reluctant to do so because they believed it would divert energy from their campaign against British security forces and "economic targets". Allegedly, after a pub in West Belfast was sprayed with gunfire by the UDA, an IRA unit planned to detonate a large car bomb in a Protestant housing estate in Lisburn, but IRA commanders quickly threatened to expel anyone involved in such an unauthorised attack. Interviewed a week before the Shankill Road bombing, a representative of the IRA's "General Headquarters Staff" stated: The UDA's Shankill headquarters was above Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road. The UDA's Inner Council and West Belfast brigade regularly met there on Saturdays. Peter Taylor says it was also the office of the Loyalist Prisoners' Association (LPA), and on Saturday mornings was normally crowded, as that was when money was given to prisoners' families. In 1992 a police informer had heard that the IRA were planning to attack the building using coffee-jar bombs packed with Semtex but the plan never materialised. According to Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack, the IRA had the building under surveillance for some time. The IRA had already tried to assassinate Johnny Adair on three separate occasions in 1993 and three days before the Shankill Road bomb an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) hit squad was arrested by the RUC near his home. An interview Adair gave to The Guardian newspaper bestowed the IRA's plans even greater urgency; striking at the UDA's headquarters, killing Adair and other senior UDA men mere days after he had boasted about killing Catholics in a national newspaper would be the "ideal rebuttal" to the growing number of critics the IRA faced in Catholic Belfast, and in the organisation's own ranks. Reportedly, the IRA made the final decision to launch the operation when one of their scouts spotted Adair entering the building on the morning of Saturday 23 October 1993.