Hi °C | Lo °C You can hear in the conversation with the senior loyalist Jackie McDonald how the stand-off involving the UDA and the Social Development Minister Margaret Ritchie is being made personal.
For SDLP, he claims, read Sectarian Demonisation of the Loyalist People.
It is the same old story. With the UDA it is always someone else's fault. Who really believes that this is the loyalist community being picked on or demonised by the SDLP?
Does McDonald really believe it, or is he searching for an excuse?
Can you fund conflict transformation in the loyalist community employing political figures associated with the UDA when the security assessment has that organisation up to its neck in crime?
The 60 days that Margaret Ritchie gave the UDA to decommission ends on October 9. McDonald has many times ruled out decommissioning within that period - and, now you hear in his words, how the UDA is beginning to personalise all of this.
"She [Margaret Ritchie] dug this hole," the UDA brigadier argues, "and she's going to have to get herself out of it."
He went on to suggest that the Minister is "between a dog and a lamp post" - that having made the demand for decommissioning, she can't and won't back down.
"It's the SDLP versus the loyalists," he argues.
But it's not. It is the peace process asking the same questions of the UDA that had to be answered by the IRA.
Recently, McDonald was suggesting a dialogue between loyalists and the Department for Social Development.
His argument then was to use the time available to see what could be achieved - to find a compromise position, "so that at the end of 60 days we are in the best possible place".
So, is anything happening?
He says the UDA "can't deliver anything, because she wants guns".
"No deadline has been stuck to in this country," is McDonald's argument. "There has to be room for manoeuvre."
There has always been room for manoeuvre in this process - but this time the UDA needs to create the space.
Or is it "between the dog and the lamp post"?
Does the real power and influence within that organisation rest with those who have the guns, the money from drugs and other criminality?
The UDA is dropping a line that it wants to be heard - a suggestion that there was a plan for a big announcement on the future of the organisation, and that all would have been revealed on Remembrance Sunday, November 11.
That planned statement, I am told would be the stuff of "very, very, significant progress".
But, now, of course, it is in doubt because of the Margaret Ritchie deadline.
The UDA is so predictable.
Why not tell the Minister in private of their plans?
Or by hinting that it could now take its "very significant" statement away, is the UDA once again playing games with and in this process?
Margaret Ritchie is not going to break under UDA pressure. She needs something to make her change her mind.
