William Hunter had worked for seven years in a north Belfast branch of Asda. The Wal-Mart subsidiary sacked him for suggesting to a customer that he play a different song on his car stereo. Indignant local people protested outside the supermarket for four days and one of the city’s best known politicians described the shopworker as “the salt of the earth” and “an asset to Asda”. The company bowed to the pressure and Hunter got his job back after apologising for “the unintentional offence caused”.

It’s not quite the victory for workers’ rights and popular protest that it seems. Hunter had suggested that the customer play the sectarian loyalist anthem The Sash, a favourite of the marching bands that assert their control over the north’s streets. The politician who spoke up for him was convicted UVF double murderer Billy Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s assertion that Hunter is “not the type of person to act in a sectarian manner” is seriously undermined by the man’s personal history. In a previous job he had spent several months trying to persuade two Catholic brothers with whom he worked to join him in a card game. When they did they were murdered by the UVF, a crime for which Hunter served fourteen years in prison.

An action of that sort might not fall within Billy Hutchinson’s definition of sectarian but anyone who does not share the world view of a loyalist murder gang brings a rather different perspective to the matter.

Gerard McErlane, a brother of the murdered men got it right when he said “he’s still a bigot, he’s still trying to incite hatred… I know the way my brothers were set up to be killed. It was brutal, bigoted, sectarian murder.”I wonder if Asda knew about him. I wonder what they will do about him.”

So what has happened here is that a man with a history of the most extreme sectarian behaviour has been reinstated following a campaign orchestrated by the murder gang with which he had been affiliated. In British terms it’s rather like a BNP member who’d served a life sentence for a racist murder and then been sacked for racially abusing a customer getting his job back after his party pickets the shop for a few days. Forget about the riots in Ardoyne. This episode shows how even in times of relative calm the northern Irish state is institutionally sectarian. Anyone who thought that the “peace process” would make sectarianism wither away  should reflect on the significance of episodes like this, the impunity if the loyalist gangs and the increase in sectarian attacks.

The place was a bit like that in 1966.