Qualla: Belturbet bombing

Belturbet bombing: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JagoStudio, CC BY-SA 4.0. Geraldine O'Reilly was fifteen years old, home from school on her Christmas holidays, and she had been sent into Belturbet town in her brother's car to pick up chips for the family. She was in Slowey's chip shop on Main Street, waiting to be served. Patrick Stanley was sixteen, a helper on a Calor Gas delivery lorry from Clara in County Offaly; the lorry had broken down that afternoon, and he and the driver had decided to stay overnight in Belturbet. He was in the public phone box outside, trying to ring his parents to tell them he would not be home. It was 10.28 p.m. on the Thursday after Christmas. They both died instantly. The bomb in the red Ford Escort parked between the chip shop and the phone box had been carrying a hundred pounds of explosives.

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Image: JagoStudio | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belturbet bombing: Three Bombs in Forty-Nine Minutes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olliebailie, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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. out...

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Image: Olliebailie | CC BY-SA 4.0

Belturbet bombing: Belturbet That Christmas

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Belturbet bombing: What Did Not Happen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 k...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Belturbet bombing: The Memorial on Main Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 memoria...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Belturbet bombing: Belturbet Beyond the Bomb

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deadstar, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Railw...

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Image: Deadstar | CC BY-SA 3.0