The murderer and former loyalist icon Michael Stone, who stormed Stormont today claiming to have a bomb, has been widely condemned.
The loyalist, Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG) said today's meeting of the Assembly was due to be one of the most important days in the history of Northern Ireland.
"The Ulster people were waiting anxiously to hear what our political leaders would say on the many substantive and major issues facing us all for the first time, and maybe the last, for a long time, to make critical decisions that would affect our children and their children.
"This is, and has been, an emotional time for the Ulster people, causing much stress. For Michael Stone to act out this gimmick in the most eccentric way was to make our people look petty and irresponsible in many of our own people's eyes and in the eyes of the world.
"He let Sinn Fein and Irish nationalism off the hook again and weakened the unionist argument to be nothing more than laughable," the UPRG said in a statement.
Former taoiseach Albert Reynolds, who negotiated the Belfast Agreement, said Mr Stone's actions should not derail the restoration of power sharing.
However a friend of Mr Stone defended him saying strong medication he has been taking for crippling arthritis may have affected his mental state.
One unnamed source said: "The man could hardly walk, and how he made it that far in his condition is beyond me. He has been an ill man and for a long time.
"The medication might have something to do with his mental state, but I wouldn't write this off as the actions of a crackpot. Michael hasn't been well and is maybe a bit confused. But he's certainly no nutter."
Mr Stone gained notoriety in March 1988 when television cameras caught him attacking the IRA funerals of two men and a woman shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.
He launched a gun and grenade attack on mourners killing an IRA member and two civilians before making his escape across Milltown cemetery, pursued by mourners.
Stone was given a 684-year sentence in 1989 for six murders and five attempted murders, but was set free along with hundreds of other loyalist and republican prisoners as part of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
Despite the IRA ceasefire, Mr Stone believed the Provisionals would try to kill him in revenge for Milltown. He later confirmed he intended to kill Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
Armed with seven grenades, a pistol and a box of ammunition he had planned to strike inside St Agnes Church, Andersonstown, during a Requiem Mass for three IRA members.
"I wanted to pull a grenade out and blast the two of them to smithereens," he later wrote. But he abandoned the plan after watching a weeping sister of one of the three.
"I saw her grief and felt sad for her. The blonde girl saved Adams' and McGuinness' lives."
Failure to go through with the attack inside the church was a source of considerable regret which never left him, according to associates.
Apart from the attack at Milltown, as one of the UDA's most feared gunmen who once stalked Mr McGuinness in Derry.
When freed, he embraced the IRA and loyalist ceasefires, — and the developing peace process — but refused to apologise for his past.
He once declared: "If I was to say sorry, I believe it would fall on deaf ears. Those operations were military operations. I do not regret any fatalities that have occurred."
He has nine children from two failed marriages, and at least three grandchildren. At the time of Milltown, his status among loyalists was almost iconic. But since his release, his standing has dropped.
Once feted in loyalist circles, Mr Stone's with his trademark ponytail of greying hair, became more isolated as loyalist paramilitarism descended into organised crime and infighting.
Friends and enemies were either killed off by rivals as part of bitter power struggles, sent to jail, or like the infamous Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair were forced to flee Northern Ireland.
The two were inseparable at one time, particularly while they were in jail together. But with Mr Adair now exiled in Scotland, there is considerable animosity between the two, according to loyalists in Belfast.
Mr Stone took up painting and has sold some of his work for up to stg10,000 a time. He also made money from an autobiography which detailed his life as a loyalist hitman.
Police in Belfast questioned Stone a number of times since his release, once in recent months about the discovery of an arms cache, and he believed detectives were building a case to have him charged and sent back to jail because of alleged self-incriminating evidence.
His worsening physical state however left him in constant pain. One associate said: "A lot of people are at sixes and sevens where this [peace] process is going, especially within the loyalist community.
"They are being pulled all over the place and Michael Stone behaving in this way really doesn't surprise me. Until he is charged, or certified, we won't know.
"All right, he may be confused and not thinking straight, but the Michael Stone of a few years ago would have gone in there (Stormont), or waited in the car park outside and taken a couple of them politicians out."