Death and Legacy
On 20 March 1995, while travelling by train into London from Gatwick airport, Sir James died of a heart attack. This was the same day that the Belfast Telegraph carried a front page story saying that an Ulster MP had been targeted as one of twenty MPs invited by the LGBT rights organisation OutRage! in a letter to come out. On 20 June 2005 the Belfast Telegraph carried a further story of how the columnist Leo McKinstry (writing in the Spectator) had as a boy rejected "anguished" attempts at "intimacy" from Kilfedder.
He died unmarried, survived by two sisters. Sir James was described as
"a phenomenon or perhaps a left-over from a remote era of Northern Irish politics when Ulster was represented by such figures as Lord Robert Grosvenor, Major Robin Chichester-Clark, Stratton Mills, and Rafton Pounder."
Sir Jim was described by DUP MLA Peter Weir as "the best MP North Down ever had." The UPUP did not outlive him, and the by-election for his Commons seat was won by Robert McCartney standing as a "UK Unionist". He had fought the seat in the 1987 general election as a "Real Unionist" with the backing of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship.
At the 1987 election count, in his victory speech, Kilfedder had "attacked his rival's supporters as 'a rag tag collection of people who shame the name of civil rights.' He said they included communists, Protestant paramilitaries and Gay Rights supporters and he promised to expose more in future." McCartney lost North Down in 2001 to Lady Hermon of the Ulster Unionist Party.
Kilfedder's personal and political papers (including constituency affairs) are held in PRONI, reference D4127.
Kilfedder is buried in Whitechurch Cemetery just outside Ballywalter.
Read more about this topic: James Kilfedder
Famous quotes containing the words death and, death and/or legacy:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)