Anyone eye-balling Billy Hutchinson would need strong nerves. One of the chief spokesmen for the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party, the 42-year-old Shankill man is infused with a riveting intensity that can be almost frightening.
He's a marathon runner, a man for the long haul. Up at Castle Buildings, Stormont, he is shaping up for the final stretch of the talks. He says there's a reasonable chance of success.
"I think this will partially work. I think we can now make things 35 per cent better than they were before, while aiming ultimately for 100 per cent."
Mr Hutchinson recently appeared on BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight television programme discussing punishment beatings with Glyn Roberts of Families Against Intimidation and Terror. Mr Roberts, an Alliance member, tore into Mr Hutchinson, castigating paramilitary groupings, including the UVF, to which the PUP has links, and demanding he condemn such beatings.
Mr Hutchinson took it on the chin for a while, but then came the sharp counter-punches. He argued that it was people in the working-class parties like the PUP and the Ulster Democratic Party who were genuinely trying to deal with the problem. He told of how his own brother had been mistakenly shot in a punishment shooting.
He complained that middle-class people in Alliance could pontificate but were divorced from the reality of how the issue could be truly addressed, on the ground.
All the time he fixed Roberts with a gimlet eye that would pierce the steel at Harland and Wolff shipyard. The FAIT man didn't flinch, but the image Mr Hutchinson conveyed was of a driven man.
Talking to The Irish Times over lunch, he is much more relaxed, quietly-spoken, and at ease with himself.
Like some former prisoners, he likes plain food. After 15 years in the Maze, his constitution does not incline towards the nouvelle. The fare on offer is interesting, but he goes for soup, steak minus the pepper sauce and a custard pudding. He is as thin as a whippet, and doesn't drink or smoke.
He admits to a confrontational cussedness in his character, which is a counter to the urbanity of his colleague David Ervine. "At the talks, Davy's the articulate one, I'm the authentic one."
Even his sporting heroes point to that nature, all of them tough, obstinate, aggressive: cricketers Geoff Boycott and Chris Tavare, and soccer players Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner. He's a hardened Leeds United supporter. He took great delight in recently being introduced to Giles by Eamon Dunphy. He likes Dunphy. "I see a lot of me in him."
His favourite musician is Robert Johnson, American bluesman of the 1930s; his favourite tune is Johnson's Crossroads.
As for his sense of allegiance: "Politically I am British, culturally I am Irish. After all, I was born in the north-east corner of Ireland." Mr Hutchinson was recruited into the UVF around 1972 because he was discovered to be a good man in a riot. The targets tended to be the RUC and British army, chiefly because they were in the middle, keeping loyalists from having at neighbouring nationalists. "I was 16 at the time. I was very involved, always in the front line. The UVF recognised that."
Various IRA actions of the early 1970s, particularly Bloody Friday, convinced him he had to "do something for my country".
"When I joined I knew one of three things would happen to me: I would end up in prison, I would get maimed, or I would get killed. Of the three, prison was the easiest option." Which is where he ended up for 15 years.
At the time he believed he was taking the fight to the IRA. In 1974 he prowled Belfast in a car with a UVF accomplice looking for targets. Around 7.35 a.m. they found two Catholics heading to work; Michael Loughran and Edward Morgan. Both were shot dead. The UVF made the usual claims about the victims, which were rejected by their families and the local community, who said the men were killed simply because they were Catholics.
Mr Hutchinson and his friend got life imprisonment. He has never tried to make contact with the families of the murdered men. "I believed what I was doing was for my country," he says. But he adds: "We all have to take responsibilities for our own actions."
Tackling the subject of murder with anyone who has killed is always a tricky part of any interview, but Mr Hutchinson confronts the issue. "The bottom line is you have to survive." "People react differently to having killed someone. Some just walk into the RUC station and admit the murder because they can't live with themselves.
"Others find God, but I couldn't do that because I am a devout atheist. Others just fall apart. But if you're to survive you must cope. It's as simple as that."
He will not "condemn" the UVF or its actions. It's the forbidden word in republican and loyalist paramilitarism. But politics, he feels, and embarking on the marathon road to Castle Buildings, is one way of making amends.
"In some ways - almost in a biblical or spiritual way, I suppose - I am repenting by trying to make this a better place for people. I want to make a constructive rather than a destructive contribution. That makes it easier for me, the more I do. It's like some sort of penance."
Since he returned to normal society he has, at different times, been under threat from groups as diverse as the INLA, IRA, and LVF. "We have the usual protections at our home, and I check under my car. But if people want to kill you they will kill you. The thing is not to make it easy for them."
Mr Hutchinson began serious study and serious running when he was in the Maze compounds. He lacked confidence in his abilities, but Liam McAnoy, an Official IRA prisoner, convinced him he was bright enough to do an Open University course.
He gained a degree in social sciences, studying sociology, geography, psychology, economics, and politics, useful subjects for his subsequent political career based in his Shankill community, where severe social problems are endemic.
Athletics became a passion. "Seven times around Compound 21 at the Maze was a mile," he recalls. It was the beginning of a regime that he continues to this day: out of bed around 5.30 a.m., out on the road by 6 a.m., clocking up about 85 miles per week. Even when the talks moved to London and Dublin he maintained the routine, police and gardai trailing him in patrol cars for protection.
He read Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in prison, and empathised with the hero. He too is a loner, yet fully involved in his political and community work. He is manager of the Springfield Inter-community Development Project, which promotes closer economic, social and cultural links between the nationalist Falls and the loyalist Shankill.
It was through this area that he became friendly with the late Pat McGeown, a Sinn Fein councillor and former IRA hunger-striker. Mr Hutchinson says they got on well because they shared a common experience: they were loyal to opposing ideologies; they had suffered and perpetrated violence; and had found common cause to end the conflict. West Belfast SDLP councillor Mr Alex Attwood listened to Mr Hutchinson at one meeting. "At first all I heard was a man who had murdered two people from my community, but the more he spoke the more I heard the man."
The two became good friends. "Billy is an immense man. He has a sincerity that means he will never deny what he did and where he comes from. But what he is intent upon is making sure that nobody goes back to that sort of life."
He's married to Eileen, a lively, outgoing woman also from the Shankill. She is a balance to his obsessiveness. "I knew her since she was 13." Where did he propose to her? "In prison, but I only asked her to marry me when I knew I was going to be released. I would not have put that upon her when I was in prison."
Their 14-year-old son Christopher goes to an integrated school. "I felt that growing up in a house on the Shankill with my background he needed to be exposed to different views." He can't quite figure Christopher out. "Most of his friends are Catholic, but he supports the traditional loyalist teams, Linfield, Rangers, Liverpool."
He reckons there's a good chance of a reasonable settlement in the talks, although with inevitable violence from splinter republican and loyalist paramilitaries it will be years before violence peters out.
He is a socialist and a unionist, and two of his heroes are Edward Carson and James Connolly. "Michael O'Riordan, leader of the Communist Party in Ireland, gave me a complete set of the works of Connolly." The resonant line from Connolly is that people matter above territory.
The quote he likes from Carson is the advice he gave fellow unionists when Stormont was being established 67 years ago. "From the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority". Says Mr Hutchinson: "They didn't do that."
He complains there were too many middle- and upper-class unionists prepared to stoke the embers of working-class loyalist violence.
Which prompts him to quote his favourite lines from the poem, Suicide in the Trenches, by the anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, written at the end of the first World War:
You smug faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by
Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.
What's happening up at Stormont these days, says Mr Hutchinson, is an attempt to prevent more loyalist, and republican, lads entering into another generation of violence. "That's what it's about."
Tomorrow: Martin McGuinness.