Paddy O’Reilly, a garage owner in Belturbet, was first to find Paddy Stanley. As he hurried down the town to see if he could help anybody, he saw a car lying on its side in flames, twisted metal and glass everywhere. And then, by the phone box outside the post office, he made his own grim discovery.
“The door was blown off the phone box,” Paddy, now aged 86, told RTÉ Investigates. “And the young Stanley lad was lying on top of the door. I had to stoop down on me hands and knees and catch a hold of him by the leg of his trousers, catch him as best I could so as I could lift him. And I carried him up to the showroom of my garage. I didn’t know who the lad was. I hadn’t a clue and couldn’t recognise him. I had him in my arms and I remember saying, ‘Will someone, for God’s sake, say the Act of Contrition?’ That was the very words I said.”
For the Stanley family, the next days, weeks and months are an unhappy blur. Teresa Stanley was too grief-stricken to even go to Paddy’s funeral. It was only then that her other children learned she was, in fact, pregnant.
“It was years later before she told us she could feel her grief affecting the child inside her,” Greta said.
“That’s how she described it. That Susan curled up and said I’m staying here, I’m not moving. You could nearly say that Mammy wanted to protect her from the world. She felt very much that this was her reaction to the news. That this child curled up inside her and was staying there.”
Teresa was struggling to cope with losing her son when she gave birth to a baby girl. And when Susan Stanley was born, doctors discovered that both her arms were broken. The family remember Teresa wrapped rigidly in despair, doubled up in deep, emotional pain.
“What it was,” Susan explained, “was grief.”