ANYONE dealing with the Portadown loyalist Mr Billy Wright approaches him with a degree of circumspection. He has admitted he has been regularly questioned about very serious crime in the mid Ulster area and that he is nicknamed "King Rat".

He is of average build, about six feet, with close cropped hair and piercing eyes. "Not the sort of fellow you would out stare," according to one acquaintance. He is intelligent and shrewd doesn't drink or smoke, and has declared unequivocal support for the actions of the outlawed UVF.

He has never been convicted of UVF membership or, since reaching adulthood, of paramilitary activity.

Mr Wright told one journalist who had written about such matters that he had no difficulty with his report. What had offended him was that the article described him as "boasting" about these matters. "I never boast," said Mr Wright coolly.

His pedigree as a loyalist is unusual. Not many played Gaelic football with Catholics in south Armagh, as he did as a youngster and resident of a welfare home. Two of his sisters are married to Catholics. Still, these contacts notwithstanding, Mr Wright justifies loyalist sectarian slaughter such as at Greysteel and Loughinisland.

He is a menacing figure to Catholics in the mid Ulster area a hero to some working class loyalists, a purported thorn in the side of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) despite his avowed allegiance to that organisation.

I have been instructed not to talk to, or about, Billy Wright," a source close to the UVF told The Irish Times. "Billy Wright is persona non grata."

Asked was he saying the UVF intended bring Mr Wright to book, the source said "I would imagine that anyone who breaks the authority of the UVF would be disciplined."

But Mr Wright is a difficult person to dominate or censure. He has a strong power base in mid-Ulster with several trusted lieutenants who according to a UDA source, "would go through walls for him". At Drumcree last week, he told several Orangemen and loyalists, who seemed very happy in his company, that as far as he was concerned the loyalist ceasefire was over.

HE has survived several assassination attempts, including one by the former INLA leader, Dominic McGlinchey, himself the victim of assassination.

Mr Wright claimed that shortly after the IRA called its ceasefire in August 1994 it arranged to have him murdered. He alleged that it tried to have him stabbed in a contract type murder, which the IRA hoped would be treated as a sectarian, non-paramilitary killing.

Mr Wright believes that 12 months of his 36 years have been shaved away in RUC interrogation centres. "I have been arrested and interrogated more than any other loyalist in Northern Ireland," he said in one of several interviews he has give in recent years.

He is said to be unbreakable in RUC interrogation.

An RUC officer who observed him orchestrating a loyalist protest in Portadown last year, to coincide with the Orange demonstration at nearby Drumcree, recalls. "Billy had about 300 drunken yobs around him. When he told them to sing, they sang. When he told them to sit down, they sat. When he told them to stop shouting, they stopped. Whatever Billy told them to do, they did."

He says he was dubbed "King Rat" by a former IRA prisoner who is now a journalist. The same reporter was forced to leave Northern Ireland for a considerable period because of UVF threats.

Mr Wright's parents broke up when he was six and he was sent to a welfare home in Mount Norris, a small town in south Armagh, the republican heartland. He played Gaelic football and soccer with boys of both main religions.

He recalled his primary school teacher as being a Protestant nationalist who enriched his life. "I learned all about the Famine and Patrick Pearse and the Easter Rebellion from her. I could well understand the fierce resentment the Irish had against England," he said in a Sunday Tribune interview last year.

"I loved Irish history and the songs that they sang in my days in south Armagh. On Sundays, we would go to Whitecross watch the Gaelic football games.

THE 1976 IRA Kingsmills massacre in south Armagh, in which 10 Protestant workers were murdered, was the turning point in Mr Wright's life. I realised then that these people were murdered because of what I was, a Protestant."

He thereafter, according to himself, joined the youth wing of the UVF and not long after, as a teenager, was imprisoned for six years on a hijacking and arms charge, serving his time in Crumlin Road jail and in the Maze. While he was not convicted as a paramilitary, he chose to serve his time in the UVF wing at the Maze.

An uncle, a Salvation Army worker, was shot dead by the IRA, and two in laws were also killed by the IRA. These were all ordinary Protestants, he said. It wasn't fair. Why should loyalist people stand idly by? There has to be retaliation against the Sinn Fein/IRA axis.

In the early 1980s, he was a remand UVF prisoner for 10 months, charged with murder and attempted murder in Armagh on the word of "super grass" Clifford McKeown. He was set free when Mr McKeown retracted his evidence.

Mr Wright has justified UDA and UVF actions, such as at Greysteel and Loughinisland, in which a total of 12 Catholics and one Protestant were murdered. That's just war," he said, adding that these were retaliatory strikes for IRA mass killings of Protestants in the Shankill and at Teebane. It was such retaliation which compelled the IRA to call its August 1994 ceasefire he believes.

The Dublin Government, according to Mr Wright would be well acquainted with his views. Through an intermediary he briefed the Government twice on loyalist thinking, he said.

He also recently warned that Dublin would be targeted if the loyalist ceasefire broke down.

Mr Wright has said that if he could get hundreds of leading IRA members into a room he would gladly plant a bomb there and "blow them all to hell".