Rachel’s mother reveals struggle to keep going

The mother of murdered Rachel O’Reilly has spoken of how she struggled with the will to keep on living after her daughter was murdered by her husband.

The 30-year-old mother of two was beaten to death in 2004 by her husband Joe O’Reilly at their Dublin home in one of the country’s most infamous murder cases.

Her mother Rose Callaly was speaking on the Ray D’Arcy Show yesterday, along with the brother of a young mother killed on Christmas Day with her two daughters, on the families of murder victims being forgotten by the justice system.

Rose Callaly said the trauma of her daughter’s death left her battling just to wake up every morning.

She said: “In the beginning there was many a time when I would wake up in the morning and I would say to myself ‘if I could just keep my eyes closed’.

“If I could have just kept my eyes closed and not have to open them again it would have been the greatest thing for me then. I still get days like that.

“You’re on a different path. It’s a different life. I’m a different person and it’s always going to be.”

She said she had come face to face with evil when her daughter was brutally killed by her husband.

“[Evil] is something we all know is out there but it’s not until it really happens to you that you know what it feels like and what it does to you. Having said that, I still feel there is so much good out there.”

The heartbroken Dublin mother said the death of her daughter Ann from cancer six years later in 2010 left her completely devastated.

She said: “When Ann died I just felt the world collapsed on my head.

“I just felt I wouldn’t make it. I realised the goodness of people. I sort of feel there is so much good out there too.”

Meanwhile, the brother of a devoted young mum, murdered in a horrific Christmas morning killing along with her two small daughters, has told how he feels their murderer should “never see the light of day”.

Sharon Whelan, 30, Zsara, 7, and Nadia, 2, were murdered by Brian Hennessy who set fire to the isolated farmhouse where they lived in Windgap in Kilkenny on Christmas Day 2008.

While the young girls died from smoke inhalation, it emerged in the days after the triple murder that their mother had been killed before the fire by the young postman who had raped and strangled her as her children slept in their beds awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus.

John Whelan said he has had days when he would have welcomed the death penalty but he generally believes the killer should never be let out of prison.

He said: “I would have flicked the switch myself.

“There are days I still feel that way but on balance I don’t think anyone has the right to take a life but I do believe that people who make a conscious decision to end another human being’s life should not see the light of day.”

He said he felt like he had been kicked in the stomach when the consecutive life sentences handed out at Brian Hennessy’s trial in 2009 were overturned on appeal the following year to instead run alongside each other.

He said: “We went from in that split second from a place where we felt we got some justice to a place where we found out a life sentence can mean anything from single figures up to 12 or 15 years. Three lives. It’s not just. It’s far from justice.

“The whole idea that he can sit down at a parole board after seven years just brings back all that hurt and anxiety for families again.”

John Whelan, who is the vice-chairman of the family advocacy group AdVic, said he believes the families of murder victims are being forgotten by the justice system.

“We feel the scales are in the perpetrators’ and murderers’ favour and families are kind of sidelined.

“They should listen to us. At the moment we feel our voices are not being heard. Justice is something that is done to us, not with us.”