The Belturbet attack was the second of three coordinated car bombs detonated along the border that night. The first had gone off at 10.01 p.m. in Clones, County Monaghan — a blue Morris 1100 outside the post office, seriously injuring two men. The third exploded at 10.50 p.m. outside a pub at Mullnagoad near Pettigo in County Donegal, severely damaging the building but injuring no one. All three cars had been stolen earlier that day in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. All three were detonated within a forty-nine-minute window in towns no more than twenty miles from Enniskillen. The bomb that killed Geraldine and Patrick had been driven across the border at the unapproved Aghalane crossing around 9 p.m. to avoid Irish security. Nobody claimed responsibility, but security services concluded the Ulster Volunteer Force was responsible. A 2004 Irish parliamentary inquiry named a man called Robert Bridges as the organiser of the three attacks.

Eight other people were seriously injured in the blast. Twenty-three houses and fourteen cars on Butler Street were damaged. Pieces of the bomb car were found in a hundred-yard radius. Geraldine's brother Anthony had been waiting for her in his car ten feet from the explosion; he was badly hurt but survived. The damage was estimated at £200,000 in 1972 money. The bomb went off at the end of the year that had seen Bloody Sunday in Derry, the most violent twelve months in the entire history of the Troubles. The killings in Belturbet were part of a deliberate Loyalist campaign to carry the war south of the border — the UDA had publicly threatened just six weeks before the attack to "strike again across the border" against the Republic of Ireland. The teenagers killed that night were the most innocent kind of casualty: a girl getting takeaway for her family, a boy in a phone box.

No one was ever convicted for the Belturbet bombing, or for any of the other Loyalist bombings in the Republic of Ireland during that period — and there were many. Three weeks after Belturbet, a UVF bomb in Dublin killed another man. In May 1974 the Dublin and Monaghan bombings killed thirty-four civilians in a single afternoon, the deadliest day of the entire conflict. In November 1975 two bombs at Dublin airport killed one and injured ten. In December 1975 another car bomb in Dundalk killed two more. The pattern was clear and the perpetrators were largely identifiable; the prosecutions never came. Families of the dead spent decades campaigning for acknowledgment that did not arrive. The journalist Fran McNulty made an award-winning radio documentary called *The Forgotten Bomb* about Belturbet, featuring interviews with both parents of Patrick Stanley and with Anthony O'Reilly, who survived. Joe Stanley, Patrick's father, spoke at the thirtieth anniversary memorial service in 2002, weeks after Patrick's mother had died without seeing anyone held to account for her son's killing.

It took until 2007 — thirty-five years after the bomb — for a permanent monument to Geraldine and Patrick to be erected on Main Street in Belturbet, at the site of the explosion. Cavan County Council placed it there. The families had been asking for it for decades. Annual memorial services are held at the spot. The town is small enough — population around 1,610 at the most recent census — that the memorial is impossible to miss, and the names are remembered by everyone who grew up there. The killings happened during a period when the Troubles were thought of as something that mostly stayed north of the border. Belturbet is one of the places that proves that was never entirely true. A girl who was on Christmas holidays from school and a boy who was trying to call his parents from a phone box died on Main Street that night, and the town has spent every Christmas since carrying the weight of it.

Belturbet has been here a long time and will be here a long time still. It sits on the upper Erne, at the head of navigation for the Shannon-Erne Waterway, and the old Belturbet railway station — once the meeting point of the Cavan and Leitrim Railway and the Great Northern Railway — now operates as a railway museum, with restored locomotives and signal boxes preserved for visitors. The town has been a market centre and river port since the early seventeenth century, and pleasure cruisers still tie up at its riverbank in summer. None of this erases what happened on 28 December 1972. But it is also true that the people of Belturbet have not allowed the bomb to be the only thing their town is remembered for. They built a memorial because remembering matters. They built it for two teenagers who never got home for Christmas.