I occasionally meet people on the street, ordinary decent people from different backgrounds, who know me. But they walk silently past. Their attitude is wholly justified. I was once an apologist for a loyalist paramilitary organisation (the UDA) and its actions. These people, quite rightly, have nothing but disdain for paramilitaries and their past or present excuse-makers. Some in media have a similar attitude where I am concerned. Hardly surprising, given that they too are members of, and care deeply about, our society. I am told that their thinking is along the lines of: “This guy has some cheek pontificating about how things should be, given his past. A past that he has never sought to address or explain.” They too are wholly justified in taking that position. I should long ago have publicly addressed my past. I will try to do that here – and explain the reason for my recent pontificating.
I have never offered any plausible explanation for my joining a paramilitary organisation, for one simple reason: I don’t have any. Many paramilitary members, on all sides, could point to having lost family, friends, neighbours, and so on, as their reason for joining. I did indeed lose close friends, but that was after I joined. Others might have had their homes attacked, suffered overt discrimination, grew up exposed only to negative stereotypes of “the other side”, or were products of a terrible home environment. Again, none of that applied to me. I was raised in a large loving family, by determinedly anti-sectarian parents. They raised 10 of us (eight boys and........