A sister of the Catholic taxi driver shot dead in Belfast on Monday night has appealed for no retaliation and for an end to all violence in the North. Mrs Eilish O'Reilly said her brother, Mr Larry Brennan (51), would not have wanted his murder to be used as a justification for any further attacks.
"He was a non-political person, and he would have known that a spiral of anger and vengeance would serve no purpose. It will only create more mayhem, more pain and more hurt for everyone," she said.
Mr Brennan was shot as he sat in his car outside the offices of the Enterprise taxi company on the upper Ormeau Road in south Belfast at 7.20 p.m. on Monday. He had worked with the firm for more than 20 years. The murdered man, who had two grown up children, was living with his mother, Mrs Mary Brennan, in the Markets area of Belfast, but was engaged to be married to a Protestant woman.
Mrs Brennan was yesterday being comforted by relatives and nuns from a nearby convent. She said she felt she would "die of a broken heart" after the killing. A first cousin of the murdered man was also killed by loyalists in 1972.
"I want people to know that my brother wasn't a terrorist, or that he wasn't a republican. He wasn't a violent or a bad man. He was a good human being," Mrs O'Reilly said. She said some of her brother's closest friends were Protestants and she was particularly pleased that they had called to the house. A nurse from Belfast's City Hospital, where Mr Brennan had often taken patients, also visited the family.
"He knew him from bringing patients into the renal unit, and he said how proud he was to know him, and what a wonderful, kind human being he was. It's nice that a Protestant man like that can come down here and say that. He said a bunch of flowers he brought for my mother represented what people really thought of him."
Mrs O'Reilly said her brother had been so opposed to violence that he took part in a peace rally in Belfast after the breakdown of the IRA ceasefire in February of 1996. "We walked down the town just to let our presence be known, and that we thought violence was wrong, that the violence should stop, and that there had to be another way forward, as all sensible people realise. I think that's just common sense."