My Life in Loyalism

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Before his 15th birthday he was on the British Army’s “most wanted” list and a few months later evaded capture from the security forces waiting to arrest him when he got off the school bus. Under the Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Treaty, many of the laws to be applied the Northern Ireland will emanate from the EU, but without a democratic procedure involving elected representatives of the people of Northern Ireland .

He also saw the Civil Rights movement as a front for the IRA, and the IRA as attempting to force unionists into a united Ireland. Along with Spence and Ervine, Hutchinson was a strong advocate of moves towards peace and he played a leading role in helping to convince UVF commanders to endorse the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire in 1994. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly as MLA for North Belfast in 1998 where he served until 2003. Hutchinson quotes a future UVF comrade and PUP colleague who used to invoke his father: “’Hutchie’s da was right.

People look down their noses at me because of what I’ve done but they were the people that were talking out of the side of their hands, [saying ‘good job’]. When McGurk’s bar happened, all the adults that were about on the Shankill, they all said ‘no, McGurk’s bar was an own goal, they were building a bomb . On 31 October of that same year, Bertie Rice, a friend of Hutchinson and a voluntary worker at his constituency office, was shot and killed by members of the UDA's North Belfast Brigade who were close to Adair. Hutchinson became known as a strong supporter of the peace process, not least during an incident in Northwest Belfast in the summer of 1996. He proved very useful because of his knowledge of republican areas Although there was much indiscriminate violence, there was also some political thinking taking place among Loyalists as early as the 1970’s.

Billy Hutchinson, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, talks to Eamon about the rising tensions and fraying relationships in Northern Irish politics. The greatest example, identified in recent years prior to his passing by Lord Trimble, was that the principle of consent was presented in the political text and much public spin as meaning a cast-iron protection against any diminution of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the Union, but in the legal text- as we discovered in recent years with the subjugation of the Acts of Union- it in fact turned out that, legally, it meant much less.He said: “It was mixed because everything wasn’t positive from my point of view and the party’s point of view. He was 14 when, in 1969, many of these demarcation lines became real barricades, thrown up along the previously invisible boundaries between Protestant and Catholic areas as the Troubles began. He was involved in the negotiations which led to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998 and was nominated by the UVF as their interlocutor with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning chaired by General John de Chastelain. The councillors all sit in committees, the committees meet, make decisions and those decisions come to full council and the final decision is made there. I always say I was born into a mixed marriage because my father was a socialist and my mother was a unionist”; as a child, his father took him to the Falls to play in the park, and to the cinema.