My Life in Loyalism

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Whether you agree or not with the path taken by Billy Hutchinson it is important to hear this story. In the early 1970s Billy was involved in the formation of the Young Citizen Volunteers and was later influential in brokering the loyalist ceasefire of 1994. As the Troubles gathered pace, he describes the “tangible sense of fear” in Protestant communities such as the Shankill. At 18 Hutchinson was involved in the sectarian murders of two Catholic half-brothers, Edward Morgan and Michael Loughran, in Belfast in 1974; he was subsequently jailed for life, and served 15 years in prison, where he became the commanding officer of the UVF/Red Hand Commando prisoners. Hutchinson is a teetotaller, but much of the social life of Loyalism took place in pubs and clubhouses.

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. That is not to ‘sabre-rattle’, but rather to state as a fact that as far as loyalism is concerned, the core promises which led to the 1994 ceasefire and support for the Belfast Agreement have been shredded. Experience the joy of crafting your unique Humanist wedding or baby naming ceremony with a touch of creativity and fun. A loyalist leader says that anger in his community is now the highest it has ever been since the 1994 ceasefires and that the Government must start taking the concerns of loyalists as seriously as those of republicans “before it is too late”. Instead of being resistant to this zeitgeist, people in the Shankill and other Protestant areas should have demanded better from those unionists who took their seats in Stormont.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The UDA encouraged the LVF to claim the attack but when the claim was made Hutchinson refuted it and placed the blame on the UDA. 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.

There were lots of young men who went to school with me who didn’t take that option, but I did, and I suppose I took it because I felt threatened, people shooting at you . 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 . 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.The book also offers an intimate documentary of life in Northern Ireland from the loyalist point of view behind the headlines and media bias. Hutchinson tells how, as a teenager, he accompanied his father to see a Catholic colleague who lived in Cupar Street; nowadays, it is adjacent to a peace wall which continues to divide the Protestant Shankill and the Catholic Falls. Both men were arrested soon afterwards and were both charged with murder to which they pleaded guilty, receiving life sentences.

From when I was a young man, I watched this preacher preaching hate and wanting people to kill people, but whenever people had to do it, or were doing it, he didn’t want to know. These young loyalists formed the basis of the reformed YCV, which Hutchinson played a leading role in re-establishing in the early 1970s.The UDA Brigadier Johnny Adair was enraged by this development and, seeing Hutchinson being interviewed about the feud on television, phoned one of his deputies Jim Spence, who lived near Hutchinson, and allegedly told him to "go and shoot him right now". In October 2011 Billy Hutchinson was elected leader of the Progressive Unionist Party at the party's annual conference in succession to Brian Ervine. In October 1974 he was one of two UVF members arrested – and subsequently convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment – for the murders of Edward Morgan and Michael Loughran, two Catholic half-brothers who were shot from a passing car as they walked to work.