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. I come from a completely opposite background to Hutchinson, but very much identify with his socialist leanings. He was elected to the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly as MLA for North Belfast in 1998 where he served until 2003. As Brexit creates a new relationship between Loyalism and the rest of us on this island, understanding Loyalism is more important than ever.

Things changed because people kept rewriting it and when you do that you are moving away from the fundamentals. Mr Hutchinson said: “I have always argued that the Good Friday Agreement was never implemented in full, we don’t know what would have happened if it had been. The UVF was founded in 1965 and was a violent response to a perceived IRA threat in the late 1960’s. Hutchinson lost his seat in the 2003 election after the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin took an extra seat each. Growing up in the Shankill area of Belfast and living through the sectarian turmoil of the late 1960s, Billy Hutchinson joined the UVF in the early 1970s.This fortnightly procession of Linfield supporters, before and after home games, became an occasion for mutual provocations between the two communities.

According to Lost Lives – the volume that lists every Troubles death – the court was later told that the paramilitaries had selected their victims at random. With hindsight, the collapse of the British Empire and the emergence of the civil rights movement meant “the 1960s should have been a turning point for working-class Protestants in Northern Ireland.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. The reality is we can’t go back to the past so we need to find a path to the future and that future has to be with the political process working. 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 . The roots of Hutchinson's involvement lay three years earlier in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) leader Billy Wright by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).

PUP leader Billy Hutchinson was speaking in the wake of a letter from the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) to unionist political leaders. The book also offers an intimate documentary of life in Northern Ireland from the loyalist point of view behind the headlines and media bias. Billy Hutchinson is clearly no saint but the hope is that with a past like his, it demonstrates that change and adaption is possible.He played an important part, while in prison in the 1980’s and later on, in encouraging the Loyalist paramilitaries towards political accommodation, instead of violence.