My Life in Loyalism

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Speaking about the murders in the book My Life In Loyalism, Mr Hutchinson, who drove the car used by the killers, said: "Loughran and Morgan had been identified by the YCV as active republicans. How accurate the information was, I don't know". A seasoned observer of his party cautions, however, that there are still limits: "The PUP still see the IRA as the problem. We are a society that does not encourage dissent. Dissent is disloyal." Nevertheless, the parties close to the combatants were among those working hardest for a "Yes'" vote in the referendum a little over a year ago. As Gusty Spence puts it: "For the first time in Northern Ireland, politics has become the art of the possible."

There is no denial on his part there was discrimination against the Catholic community, but he claims it happened on the Protestant side too.They need to be brought together in a controlled place with the people they don’t like. We need to facilitate discussion rather than shut it down. Such feelings were vented on the last week of September 1970, when hundreds of local residents, mostly youths, surrounded ‘Fort Milanda’, hurling anything at hand and eventually using a large post to ram down the gates. Espying a chance to make a name for himself, as well as express what he thought of the whole situation in his homeland, Hutchinson clambered up a drainpipe and snatched the regimental flag of the King’s Own from where it fluttered. Put to him that he had a choice, he responds: “Choice is a weasel concept. You don’t have choice in life. Sometimes you have options, which aren’t a choice – you have to do one or the other.

My Life in Loyalism". Irish Academic Press. Archived from the original on 28 July 2020 . Retrieved 28 July 2020.Hutchinson is rather coy about his involvement in the double murder of two Catholics in 1974, for which he was convicted and served 16 years in prison. The “strategy” from loyalist paramilitaries was “that if they killed enough Catholics then the Catholic community would in turn put pressure on the IRA to disband,” writes Hutchinson. “This was pure sectarianism, and it didn’t work ... at the time, however, I truly believed that if we pushed the Catholic community to the edge, they would go begging the IRA to stop their terror campaign.” 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 ...' you’re in a bubble, and you go on what you’re being told.” Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf wants controversial new legislation which would make it illegal to “stir up hatred” on racial grounds (Image: PA) In the “cages” of Long Kesh, he and his comrades discussed the possibility of loyalists sharing power with nationalists and the argument, still put forward today, that the best way to protect the union was to convince middle-class Catholics of its benefits.

They made the right decisions. They’ll never be recorded in history because they won’t be named but if it wasn’t for those people, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.His memory of the time is of the people, the combatants in Loyalism, who decided to move towards the peace process. He said that there was great courage for them to stand against the people who would not have embraced peace. The book states the two men had been “identified by the YCV as active republicans”. Read More Related Articles But there hasn’t been the economic reward and a lot of people feel that we have lost the opportunity of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. It was obvious to me that there were invisible and often unspoken-of barricades that separated the Shankill and the Falls roads