Death
Despite his degree, he was unable to obtain a proper job that paid a decent salary. On the night of 24–25 September after composing a four-page letter of explanation and naming himself a "victim of the Troubles", Billy Giles hanged himself in his living room. He was 41 years old. Peter Taylor visited Giles' family in east Belfast on the eve of the funeral. He described Billy as lying in the coffin wearing his best suit, and his UVF badge with the inscribed words "For God and Ulster" was pinned to his lapel. One of his last lines in his letter read, "Please let the next generation live normal lives". This line was quoted during a speech given by Colm Cavanagh, Vice-President of The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland on 3 March 2006 to The Department of Education.
Giles is commemorated, along with other prominent Loyalist paramilitaries, in the controversial UVF song Battalion of the Dead.
Read more about this topic: Billy Giles
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)