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My Life in Loyalism

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In 2013, Hutchinson announced his intention to run in both forthcoming council and parliamentary elections. There should be no effort to evade scrutiny and public debate, and there is an onus on all those who feeling strongly to play their part in the debate. My interest as an Pancánn (Yank) reading this book was to better understand Unionism and Loyalism and what it means to those who would protect it at all costs. Also referring to the INLA as sectarian seems a little odd for the member of an organisation who murdered people for no other reason that their religion, especially when he was active during the early and mid ‘70s.

With hindsight, he would realise that similar emotions, not least the palpable sense of fear, was also being felt in Catholic communities. While he acknowledges the help of Dr Mulvenna in preparing this autobiography, the text is very much his own, and will be of interest to future historians. An insider's view of the pressures on young people in Belfast and, for him, the journey from football fan, to football hooligan, to paramilitary youth leader and finally to convicted murderer. 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.I suppose in many ways I realised that’s when I needed to make sure I had coping mechanisms, for the next time she asked me.

But my view very clearly from the Progressive Unionist Party is we all need to be working together - the Unionist parties - to make sure we get a political solution to this. 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 can’t justify anything to you, can’t justify anything to anybody out there, I can only justify it to myself, and that’s what you need to do .As he admits, the crude view of the UVF was that, if they killed enough Catholics, the Catholic community would pressurise the IRA to disband. Hutchinson and Ervine in particular became close personal friends as well as colleagues and also enjoyed a friendly rivalry with Hutchinson being a Linfield-supporting west Belfast man and Ervine from the east of the city and a Glentoran F. 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. In the prison Hutchinson, along with the likes of David Ervine, Eddie Kinner, Billy Mitchell and William "Plum" Smith, was convinced by Spence that loyalism needed to develop a more political side to its agenda and Spence encouraged these younger members to become involved in this development.

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