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Paddy O’Reilly, a garage owner in Belturbet, was the first to find Paddy Stanley. As he sped through town to see if he could help someone, he saw a car lying on its side on fire, twisted metal and glass everywhere. And then, by the phone booth outside the post office, he made his own grim discovery.
“The door came off the phone booth,” Paddy, now 86, told RTÉ Investigates. “And young Stanley was sprawled on top of the door. I had to get down on my hands and knees and grab him by the leg of his pants, grab him as best I could to get him up. And I took him to my garage showroom. I didn’t know who the boy was. I had no idea and couldn’t recognize him. I was holding him in my arms and I remember saying, ‘Will someone, for God’s sake, the act of contrition? Those were the very words I said. ” .
For the Stanley family, the next few days, weeks and months are a sad mess. Teresa Stanley was too distraught to even go to Paddy’s funeral. It was then that her other children found out that she was, in fact, pregnant.
“It took years before she told us that she could feel her pain affecting the child within her,” Greta said.
“This is how she described it. That Susan snuggled in and said that I will stay here, that I will not move. You could almost say that Mom wanted to protect her from the world. She felt very much that this was her reaction to the news. That this child snuggled inside. of it and stayed there. “
Teresa was struggling to cope with the loss of her son when she gave birth to a girl. And when Susan Stanley was born, doctors discovered that both of her arms were broken. The family remembers Teresa wrapped rigidly in despair, doubled over in deep emotional pain.
“What it was,” Susan explained, “was pain.”
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