There was something surreal about Saturday’s press conference to announce that the UVF and Red Hand Commandos had decommissioned their arms.

Dawn Purvis, leader of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party, spoke of how the paramilitary organisation had decided to get rid of its guns and play a political role in future.

Recalling the thoughts of her former leader David Irvine, she spoke of how there was no longer a need for an army to defend the loyalist populace. The war was over and the army was now being stood down.

It made it seem vaguely like VE Day at the end of the Second World War; that somehow the UVF was a legal army which had defended little Ulster against the threat of invasion and had won. Now the soldiers of the UVF could go back to civvy street.

Of course the UVF was nothing like that. Along with the UDA, which says it has begun decommissioning its arsenal, although given the numerous factions within that group it is doubtful if it will ever finish the task, the UVF were responsible for more than 1,000 deaths.

Most of those were Catholics, not IRA members or Sinn Fein members or anything but ordinary people going about their business. They were killed simply because of their religion.

The others killed by the UVF and UDA were of course loyalists. In recent years after the IRA ceasefire, the loyalist paramilitaries decided to kill each other in a series of feuds.

And the ordinary Protestant people who lived in areas where the UVF, Red Hand Commandos, UDA and the Loyalist Volunteer Force — no word yet if that group will hand over its weapons — held sway probably suffered most at the hands of the loyalist paramilitaries.

It was the presence of loyalist paramilitaries and their extortion tactics which starved those areas of investment.

Only the desperate or the naïve would consider investing in areas where large sums of money had to be paid over to the paramilitaries to prevent property or equipment being damaged or destroyed.

Of course it is another step in the right direction that the UVF and RHC have destroyed their arsenals and the UDA has started to do so. But it has taken such a long time since the original ceasefires in 1994 that they have lost all credit for doing so.

The Provisional IRA decommissioned four years ago, but that also took too long and was only completed because Sinn Fein was in such a powerful position politically that it made sense to ditch the weapons for the ballot box.

But for all their fine words, the loyalist paramilitaries have no such alternative stretching out in front of them.

The Progressive Unionist Party is tiny with little mainstream support in the unionist community. The UDA has virtually given up on politics for the same reason.

What will the ‘soldiers’ of the loyalist paramilitary bodies do now? Some of the leadership might hope that there is a political role for them, even in the background, but it is difficult to see them making any real impact.

By calling their press conferences and making a big deal out of their decommissioning, the paramilitaries were keeping up the pretence that they are people of importance. In reality, however, they were merely signalling their own impotence.

Like the Provos, all they really achieved was the creation of much misery and heartache which will take generations to ease.