Details about Peter Robinson's planned engagement with the loyalist community are sketchy, but any discussion is sure to include the questions above.

Past experience tells us that decommissioning has to be ordered. That is how it worked inside the IRA. The Army Council made it happen by issuing leadership orders. On the other side of the lines, can the loyalist leaderships do the same? This is by no means certain — part of why it has not happened so far.

There is a question about how much authority those leaderships have within and over their organisations. It is not certain that they could impose their will with leadership orders directing a decommissioning process. There is also the fear factor — not that loyalists continue to fear the old threat of the IRA, but that they fear each other.

The leader of the Progressive Unionist Party Dawn Purvis was not prepared to discuss any possible meeting between Peter Robinson and the paramilitary leadership. She was, however, willing to discuss her own plans for talks with the DUP leader and First Minister.

"Peter Robinson as leader of the DUP has asked to meet with the Progressive Unionist Party to discuss amongst other things the unresolved issues that hang over the Assembly," she said.

"He (Mr Robinson) also made very significant remarks a number of weeks ago at the unveiling of the CS Lewis mural where, probably for the first time, he said he understood why some loyalists chose a paramilitary route and he offered to help in their conflict transformation."

Ms Purvis said a "multitude of issues affecting the loyalist working-class areas" needed to be addressed. She also expects that in her meeting with the DUP leader he will raise the issue of decommissioning.

Asked was it achievable, the east Belfast MLA responded: "I don't have that foresight. So, I can't give timescales or dates. That is a matter for the UVF in its discussions with the IICD. But what I would say is that when decommissioning has been achieved then we are looking at confident, transformed loyalist communities."

Part of that transformation has to be about what the loyalist paramilitaries themselves are prepared to do — about a real going away, removing their presence and their authority and domination from the areas they controlled and taking their guns out of the estates and out of the picture.

Those guns now pose a bigger threat to loyalists and the loyalist community than to anyone else.

It is also important who loyalists choose to do their talking.

People have not forgotten the farce of Johnny Adair, Andre Shoukri, Jim Gray and John White — the criminal loyalists — being sent to talk to the then Secretary of State John Reid in the East Belfast Mission a few years ago.

It is right that there is a political engagement with all elements of loyalism. Peter Robinson is doing the right thing, and these talks might just begin to answer that question: "What about the loyalists?"