The loyalist terrorist Johnny Adair awoke this morning in the high security Maghaberry jail along with 80 other inmates linked to various republican and loyalist groups.
While paramilitary groupings are not officially recognised, the prison near Lisburn, Co Antrim, houses inmates linked to the UFF, the LVF and Orange Volunteers as well the IRA, Continuity IRA and INLA.
Despite fears for the UFF leader's safety, a prisons spokesman said he would not be segregated. He would be locked alone in his cell at night but would have several daily periods of free association with other prisoners.
The Maghaberry regime is more restrictive than in the Maze, where Adair was formerly imprisoned and where inmates were allowed to wander freely in and out of their cells. The authorities are running down the Maze and it has received no new prisoners for about two years.
Inmates linked to the UFF, the LVF and the Orange Volunteers have been agitating for their own wing in the jail, which is the North's main committal prison housing life-sentence prisoners, remand prisoners and fine defaulters. The 36-year-old father-of-three from the Shankill Road will have no special privileges in his 80-person block, called a house, where he will stay along with other sentenced, as opposed to remand, prisoners.
Like other prisoners, Adair will be able to watch reaction to his dramatic re-arrest on Tuesday night on television in a communal area, or on a privately rented set in his cell. He has in-cell sanitation and will be served three meals a day. He will be able to keep in touch with the outside world by public telephone, with cards on sale in the jail's shop. Mobile phones are not permitted. It will cost more than £200 a day to incarcerate him.
Adair, a fitness fanatic, will be able to train in the prison gym or in the open-air exercise yard. He will have unlimited access to his legal team and a minimum of one visit a week, although visitors may apply to the Prison Service for more. He was also entitled to one visit upon committal by a family member or friend, and his wife Gina went to see him yesterday.
Adair was freed from the Maze prison last September under the early release terms of the Belfast Agreement after serving five years and four months of a 16-year sentence for directing terrorism. Among Maghaberry's other inmates is a dissident loyalist suspect, Mr Clifford Peeples, who is awaiting trial on explosive charges.