A big brother still remembered 50 years after the Belturbet bombing

The Stanley sisters laugh in unison as they remember their mother. As it happens this night we meet – January 4th, a low mist across the midlands, the Christmas decorations still twinkling and all the chimneys smoking across The Green in Clara, Co Offaly – is the 10th anniversary of her death.

Teresa Stanley possessed a vivacity which her daughters inherited. They recount one of her final outrageous lines: a young priest called to the bedside, ready to administer the Last Rites. “Oh Father are you sure the priesthood is for you? You’re a very good looking man.”

Susan’s livingroom is dancing with family stories. Mary brings in cups of tea, a few glasses of wine. They nip in and out for smokes in the kitchen, and they chat away, quick to tease one another and joke.

For the past 50 years Christmas and New Year have always been a complicated time for the Stanley family. Joe and Teresa Stanley had 12 children, 10 of whom are alive. “Paddy, Vin, Bernie, Gret, me, Karen, Martin, Gabriel, Elaine, Roger,” Mary reels off. “And you forgot me,” says Susan, mock indignant. Elaine had a twin brother who died at birth.

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And Paddy Stanley was, with Geraldine O’Reilly, one of the first victims of the Troubles in the Republic when he was murdered in a no-warning loyalist car bomb in Belturbet, Co Cavan, on December 28th, 1972. Geraldine was 15 years old. Paddy was 16.

As the sisters remember it now, their parents spent the next 40 years of their lives in a state of permanent coping with that atrocity and searching for answers that never came. Susan, the youngest, was born a few months after Paddy’s death. Although she never met her brother she knows him: she can feel him. “As a child I remember no Santy, no Christmas tree. I always remember the dinner. It never bothered me. I am not sitting here with trauma because of it or anything.”

Some years, then, their parents would summon the defiance and spirit to make Christmas happen. “We could have a year where they felt good enough to cope with it,” says Greta. “The tree, decorations – and they’d be fabulous.”

In those years the house, near Marian Square, was crowded with extended family from both sides. Teresa Stanley was a dab hand at baking. “And we’re not talking shop-bought pastry: I mean puff pastry where she would roll and roll,” says Susan.

“She was making choux pastry before anyone in Clara knew what it was,” Greta adds.

Then another year would pass and a heavy gloom would pervade the house and the festive period would go by unmarked. On those years the weight of what happened was too much. Humdrum days could bring the same numb stillness. Every so often the Stanley children would arrive in from school to find their parents sitting silently with no food prepared.

“You might go in and fry a few potatoes,” Susan says. “You never looked for anything. He’d be in one chair and she’d be in the other chair, and there would be nothing. It was like they were zombies on those days. They couldn’t even talk.

“But, in saying that, I have seen my mother cross and angry but never miserable. The woman never went down that town or walked outside the house but she was looking fabulous. Her best side was always out. She was just amazing. You could feel the love coming out of her. Now Daddy was different, a bit harder.”

“Ah he was not. He was soft,” says Karen.

“If my Daddy was sitting there now, Mary says, “he’d be in that chair, bawling.”

The experience of the Stanley family in the years since the Belturbet bombing is a story of perseverance through the years when a State support system was all but non-existent. Three bombs exploded in the Republic that night. At 10.01pm a car bomb detonated in Fermanagh Street, Clones, Co Monaghan. At 10.28pm, a red Ford Escort parked outside Farrelly’s bar and McGowan’s Drapery in Belturbet exploded. Another car bomb went off outside Britton’s pub near Pettigo, Co Donegal. In Clara, like lots of villages in the Republic, the news events emanating from the North were frightening but they seemed faraway. The bombs made the late news headlines in the Stanley house.

“And they were all watching it at home. We always said the rosary at night then,” Greta remembers “So the rosary was said for the poor souls after dying and the poor families. Not knowing that it was themselves they were praying for.”

The details of that Christmas 50 years ago are as sharp in the minds of the sisters as the subsequent ones are blurry and indistinct. Greta remembers her last conversation with Paddy: they were down the town the night before it happened.

“And the day before that, Stephen’s Day, he was down in granny’s. The strange thing about it was that we had a dog called Blackie. And Blackie never left Marian Square. There was a phone box there and he would walk down to that phone box to meet people coming from school and that. But he never passed it. And he followed Paddy that day down to granny’s and lay at his feet all day. And followed him home again that night. Which was all kind of strange. We all commented on it at the time. But you only think about things like that afterwards. And two days before that we had these two pictures on the wall at home – a city lady and a country lady – and one of them fell down. And the superstition about the picture falling off the wall and death...there were all these strange things we noticed afterwards.”

Paddy worked in Jenning’s supplies on Saturdays and school holidays. Some days he’d help in the yard or deliver around the town. Every so often he’d get to go out on longer journeys with one of the drivers. On December 28th he was with Colm Daly.

“Colm had only had a new baby on the 4th or 5th of November and he had his Christmas coat on him that day. When he heard the blast he came up the town and when he saw Paddy lying there he took off the coat and put it over him,” Susan says.

Clara is close-knit. As the unimaginable news spread the next day cousins and neighbours swooped in. The other children found themselves staying in various houses in the days afterwards. This was 1972: for all the good intentions, children were sidelined. Only Mary, Bernie and Vin were allowed attend the funeral. The others learned of what happened to Paddy almost accidentally.

Karen arrived home to see a wreath on the table and asked who it was for. When she was told “Paddy” it took her a few seconds to realise they weren’t talking about her grandfather. “There was nobody there to hug me. I went upstairs and cried and cried. And that hurts me to this day.”

Greta was at the phone box near the house with her cousins when she was told to stop crying if she wanted to go home. There was no real support or outlet for their confusion or grief.

Teresa, heavily pregnant with Susan, was under medical instructions not go attend the funeral. In the archive film footage the sisters have seen their father is standing alone in a vast crowd of mourners. It still breaks their hearts.

After a week of newspaper coverage and television reports there came a silence. Months and then years passed with news of other bombs and atrocities elsewhere. It was as though Belturbet had been erased from the collective memory. When television shows revisited the years of the Troubles, other bombs and victims were commemorated. But never Belturbet seemed to feature. “That is fact. It was forgotten about,” Karen says.

Paddy Stanley was the eldest child of the house. He had been born premature: the first ever baby placed in the new incubator in Tullamore hospital. He weighed just three pounds. In the beginning Joe would hold him in his hands while Teresa washed him at the sink. By the time the others had arrived he had matured into a robust, football-loving youngster who moved felicitously between the joys of town and country. He and Vin were into everything.

The sisters talk about the night their Dad caught Paddy, Bernie and Vin trying cigarettes out the back. The time he’d landed back with an injured blackbird, washed it and put it in the oven to dry it, much to Teresa’s consternation.

“Frogs. Birds. You’d come into the bathroom and you wouldn’t know what you’d find,” says Mary. “They brought a swan home one day.”

In many ways he was typical of any boy of his time and age, lit with carefreedom. But he was theirs so he was unique.

“That this most beautiful boy was ripped from them,” says Karen. “He was holy, like. There was an aura about him. Now, he was a divil too. But he was very kind. He would share with you. Outgoing and sporty and chatty. He was a boy you’d take to.”

When Susan was 39 years old Fran McNulty made a radio documentary that reawakened memories about the Belturbet bombing. A television documentary, as part of the Léargas series, followed. Teresa gave a searing interview in which she at last submitted to revealing her heartbreak, sobbing and saying things her children had never heard their mother say before or afterwards. Not long after the family received a phone call from the Garda asking to speak to them about the Belturbet bombing.

“Nicest guards you ever met,” says Susan. “That was 39 years on. Pat O’Connell, even after that, continuously tried to do things. Funny, he actually rang when I was in St James’s Hospital when Daddy was dying and said, ‘I’ve a bit of news for you. The PSNI have said they would interview one of the suspects.’ And I had to say, ‘I’ve a bit of news too, I’m afraid, Pat. Daddy passed away this morning.’ I went back up to the room and told him anyway. That was in May eight years ago.”

Susan, bubbly and organised, has emerged as a liaison between the investigations and the family. In 2020 Frank Shouldice made a documentary, titled A Bomb That Time Forgot, which aired as an RTÉ Investigates programme. Not long after that Pat O’Connell phoned to say that an assistant garda commissioner had ordered a complete review. Graham Tolan headed it and visited various Garda stations along the Border and found boxes of gazettes – the internal Garda news circulars – from the time which detailed invaluable information.

Previously investigations had been focused on one person: just before Christmas the Garda released detailed descriptions and photofits of several new suspects. There is now a dedicated incident room in the Garda station in Ballyconnell with over 100 lines of inquiry. “The case is more open now than it has ever been,” says Susan.

In 1972 an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and unease on both sides of the Border had intensified in the winter. As Dr Edward Burke, an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, outlined on these pages in December 2020, those tensions were concentrated on the bridge at Aghalane after it was bombed that November, temporarily closing the road linking Enniskillen to Dublin. The road was hated by local Protestants because it was frequently used by IRA units in the Republic who used it as a crossing point.

“Lieut Gen Harry Tuzo, the most senior officer in Northern Ireland, made it clear to the Northern Ireland Office that he was ‘delighted’ that the bridge was now closed and that he wanted it kept that way. On the other side of the Border engineers from Cavan County Council believed that they could erect a temporary bailey bridge,” Burke wrote.

That temporary bridge was installed and the road reopened on Christmas Eve, 1972, just four days before the bomb went off in Belturbet.

On the 50th anniversary Paddy Stanley’s brothers and sisters gathered in Belturbet for a vigil to remember the victims. Visiting the Ulster town has never been easy for them. Twenty-five years ago they were invited by Cavan County Council to unveil a commemorative plaque. It was just the O’Reilly family and themselves that day. “There wasn’t a sinner on the street,” Karen says. “It was the eeriest feeling I ever had in my life. It felt as though people were looking from behind the curtains. That’s honestly what it felt like then – it was like the valley of the squinting windows.”

This time there was a much bigger attendance. Clara men who had been boyhood friends of Paddy’s were there: all of retirement age now. It still felt strange, for the Stanleys, being there. But they’ve gotten to know the O’Reillys over the years, a family whose grief and searching has been just as profound and lasting.

The lives of Geraldine O’Reilly and Paddy Stanley are commemorated in a gorgeous wrought-iron sculpture in which the pair of them are sitting on a bench in Belturbet; a couple of 1970s kids in the high-socked, collared apparel of the day. They are youngsters of a different Ireland. Paddy rests one foot on a football.

That night Geraldine had been in the local takeaway waiting for her order when the bomb exploded. Paddy was in a phone box nearby: he had been attempting to ring home to explain that they’d another delivery to do but the shop was closed so they would stay the night in Co Cavan. It should have been a lark, an adventure.

Both teenagers suffered catastrophic injuries from the blast and died almost instantly. Whenever Mary sees the statue she is compelled to make sure her brother’s hands and face are clean of outdoor dust. “You have to touch it,” she says. “And it is always so, so hard to leave him there.”

Although Geraldine’s and Paddy’s names are perpetually linked through the Belturbet bomb and both were close by one another in town that night, it is unlikely they were even aware of one another’s existence. Karen likes to believe that “in another realm” maybe Geraldine and Paddy hit it off. A teenage romance, “marriage and kids,” she says brightly, and the thought hangs after the laughter fades in the room. It’s the least they’d have wanted for him and they’ll never stop asking why and who.

Fifty years on he’s still their big brother.