Gareth Mulvenna has previously worked as a parliamentary researcher in the Northern Ireland Assembly and has held a Visiting Research fellowship at the School of Politics at Queen's University Belfast. His first book, Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries: The Loyalist Backlash was published in 2016. Billy Hutchinson is the current leader of the Progressive Unionist Party and a Belfast City Councillor for the Court Ward. In the early 1970s Billy was involved in the formation of the Young Citizen Volunteers and was later influential in brokering the loyalist ceasefire of 1994. He was involved in the negotiations which led to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998 and was nominated by the UVF as their interlocutor with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning chaired by General John de Chastelain.