BILLY WRIGHT, a former UVF prisoner, is an influential loyalist in the Mid Ulster area. Aged 35 and from Portadown, Co Armagh, he was involved in loyalist protests in that town this year and in 1995 during the two Drumcree standoffs.
He was seen regularly at Drumcree during the recent confrontation, in the company of other loyalists, some of them in Orange regalia. He is viewed as a hero figure, particularly by young loyalists, but as a dangerous militant by nationalists.
Mr Wright said yesterday he was disgusted that the Ulster Unionist Party leader, Mr David Trimble, should be castigated "for trying to keep the peace". He said that Mr Trimble, as his MP, had asked him, as a constituent, to use his influence to keep the peace.
Mr Wright has said that on two occasions he gave an insight into UVF thinking to the Irish Government through an intermediary. In April this year he said that the peace process might be in jeopardy. He is said to be extremely sceptical about the maintenance of the loyalist ceasefire.
In the early 1980s he was remanded for almost a year in prison accused of murder and attempted murder in Armagh. Charges against him, and a number of other men, were dropped when a "super grass", Clifford McKeown, retracted his evidence.
He says he has been targeted a number of times by republican paramilitaries. On one occasion the INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey tried to kill him, security sources told him.
He told the Sunday Tribune in February last year that he had joined the youth wing of the UVF when he was 15 just after the IRA had killed 10 Protestant workers at Kingsmill in Co Armagh in 1976. "I felt it way my duty to defend my people," he said.
He told another newspaper that he had been accused of matters he had nothing to do with.
In the Sunday Tribune interview he defended the UVF killing of six Catholics in Loughinisland in 1994 and the UDA murder of six Catholics and one Protestant in Greysteel, Co Derry, the previous year.
"I know it is a cruel thing to say, but when you consider when it happened it was always after atrocities and slaughter by the IRA. The Shankill bombings had just occurred and the loyalist people had reached breaking point.
"I don't believe that Greysteel or Loughinisland was murder. The nationalist people had given succour and votes to the scum of the Sinn Fein-IRA. That's just war."
Mr Wright said he would be proud to die in defence of Northern Ireland. "If the IRA shot me dead at least I'd know what I was dying for. I can honestly say I have no fear of death."
Asked if he had any regrets about his life, he said. "I am me, and I'll see it to the end. I am not leaving the battlefield."
