A big brother still remembered 50 years after the Belturbet bombing

And

“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. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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

Deep into the article the word 'atrocity' appears. Let's begin to apply the proper terms. A bomb placed in a public place is a crime against humanity. If it happens in the course of a war, it is a war crime. Such attacks should be commemorated with explicit plaques at the sites.

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