When the Loyalist Communities Council was established on October 13 2015, I was generally supportive.

It had concerned me that the loyalist paramilitary groups which announced the original ceasefire on October 13 1994 were finding it so difficult to transition entirely from their old ways and were quite obviously still armed and active, still recruiting and still of the view that their on-the-street muscle was required.

The 2015 statement acknowledged a number of realities: “A vacuum in loyalist communities has been created which has led to significant disenchantment with politics, and to our communities being largely ignored and neglected. It is no coincidence that the attainment levels of working-class loyalist young people are the lowest in the United Kingdom.”

That vacuum had been created by the electoral collapse of the PUP, which had no seats in the Assembly and barely a handful in local councils.

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For most of the time after 1921 working-class loyalism was an electoral sideshow; so much so, in fact, that it was the NI Labour Party which took up the socio/economic causes that impacted that community the most.

When the DUP was........

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