Terry Enright heard early last Sunday that his 28-year-old son had been shot, but he never believed Terry jnr would die. "With his physique, I thought he would survive, but he never regained consciousness. Even when the doctor said `I'm afraid your son is dead', I had difficulty taking it in, because I thought he was indestructible."

Youth worker Terry Enright, who was married with two daughters aged five and one, was described by people who knew him as "a big man with a big heart", someone with an enthusiasm for life and a sense of fun. An outdoor pursuits instructor, he had worked in both Catholic and Protestant areas with young people others found too difficult to deal with.

His murder by loyalist gunmen outside a Belfast nightclub last Saturday night stunned all who had come into contact with him, and his funeral on Wednesday was the biggest seen in west Belfast since the 1981 hunger strikes. Protestant community leaders were as vocal in tributes to him as their Catholic counterparts.

The fact that he had close Protestant friends and had worked with young people in hard-line loyalist areas meant he didn't have the same fear as others. His father had warned him about the dangers of working as a doorman. "He just said `Da, I worked in the Shankill and all over the place even before the ceasefires. If they wanted to shoot me, they could have shot me then'. "

SITTING in the family living-room, where scores of trophies won at boxing, football and hurling are a reminder of his eldest son, Terry snr holds back tears as he tells of his five-year-old grandchild telling her three-year-old cousin that "bad men" had shot her daddy.

A youthful-looking 53-year-old, he also works with young people. He has taken schoolchildren from the Shankill and the Falls to the Black Mountain, which he campaigned to save from development. His wife, Mary, is also a respected community activist. A keen sportsman and trade unionist, he says somebody's religion was never an issue in the household. He knows what the loss of his son will be to the community.

"I often think he was such a good role model for the kids, because apart from the lovely personality, everybody knew the reputation he had as a tough guy, and here was a guy with this reputation and yet he was so gentle. He never had to be heavy with the kids. He motivated them and they all really looked up to him."

That was borne out by the tributes paid to him by young people in west Belfast this week, many of them on the margins of their own community. One teenager said Terry Enright was the only person he had ever looked up to. "I was a nobody and he made me feel like somebody," said another. During the funeral Mass, a teenage camogie player he had coached cried as she read her tribute: "If personality was money, Terry, you would have died a millionaire."

Mrs May Blood, a Shankill Road community worker, has known the Enright family all her life. "Sometimes you meet somebody who makes an impression on you. Well, young Terry Enright was like that. You came away feeling good after you spoke to him," she says. "He saw what he was doing as part of the overall picture, one of the bricks in the process. I suppose a lot of young people on both sides of the peace line will be asking themselves the question - is there any virtue in being good?

"He was remarkable in that he didn't seem to have any baggage, which is most unusual considering where he was born and reared, as with young people from the Shan kill Road here. It's a very rare one you get that doesn't have some kind of baggage. They'll agree with you, but they always have a `but' at the end of it. Young Terry En right didn't see things with a `but' at the end of it. He saw things with a `why' - why can we not change it, why can we not make it different?"

Ms Geraldine McAteer of the Upper Springfield Development Trust, where Terry worked, says he had a knack of getting young people to come out of themselves and had a special talent with those who were particularly alienated.

"He had a real commitment to these young people because he had grown up in this area himself. At the end of the day he was one of them and he felt what he could do, they could do. He made them value themselves and brought them back into the community and he'd a great personality, a great attitude, very open, very friendly. He was right in your face."

Like many of the young people he worked with, Terry Enright left school at 16. He got a job at a fruit market. He was talented at Gaelic games, soccer and boxing, and had won all-Ireland medals for Irish dancing. "There was always an aura about him no matter what he did," says his father.

As a youth leader, he easily earned the respect of young people. "He'd give you confidence and belief in yourself, as if you could do anything. I was afraid of heights and he would just take you up a mountain and make you forget about it," says Cathal Tolan, one of the young people with whom he worked. As well as the huge outpouring of community sorrow at Terry En right's death, there is also anger that the stage was somehow set for the murder of innocent Catholics by some unionist politicians, consistently claiming the peace process was working against them. The LVF claim that he was killed in retaliation for its leader, Billy Wright, is regarded with contempt.

Terry snr is angry too that media reports immediately linked his son to the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, his wife's uncle. "What it did was completely depersonalise Terry, but that was soon turned on its head."

The gunmen who killed his son were, he believes, controlled and manipulated by others. He says they don't understand the "heart and soul of the people of west Belfast" and they can't stop "a tide of rightfulness, justice and equality and everything that we deserve as a people".

Despite his own personal tragedy, he is not despondent about the peace process. "Our people and more and more of the Protestant people are coming to recognise that these pompous people you see on television have lived on all of this fear and the threat of death over the years. They have lived off the misery of the people.

"It will never affect them or their children or anyone belonging to them. It's always working-class kids like our Terry." He hopes his son's death might help change things because so many people were repulsed by his murder and people might think again about the way they rear their children.

"I would like to think he has been inspirational to so many of the young people he worked with. I hope people will recognise the importance of what he was doing and begin to see that young people can be changed and that young people can change the way they think of themselves and their community and, in a wider context, the state, and see themselves as potentially having some sort of a stake in it."