Miami Showband

There are several atrocities in the Northern War that stand out and one them is the massacre of the Miami Showband on July 31st 1975.

The band were sometimes referred to as the “Beatles of Ireland” and they played in packed out venues across the island.

In the Six Counties, they had teenage fans from across that divided society.

When the band started playing the kids in the hall could just be kids and forget the carnage outside.

In the immediate aftermath, the murder of singer Fran O’Toole, trumpet player Brian McCoy and guitarist Tony Geraghty seemed to be particularly mindless.

However, it was anything but, it was instead the logical outworking of a policy at the highest levels of the British State.

If it had gone to plan then the murder of five members of the Miami Showband would have been a great counter-insurgency success.

Instead, the operation was botched and two survivors were left bleeding in a field.

They would live to tell their story of that awful night and pose some difficult questions for the British State.

Stephen Travers, who survived life-threatening wounds, and bandleader Des Lee, were able to identify two of their assailants – both of them UVF members also serving in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) of the British Army.

These two Brit heroes were subsequently given life sentences.

However, Travers’ recollection of a British officer overseeing the massacre was never fully explored.

Indeed, Stephen was convinced that the authorities wanted him to forget all about it.

This was no random event, rather it was the product of a well thought out strategy to defeat the IRA.

Five years before that awful night in Buskhill County Down the textbook for the operation was published.

Low Intensity Operations by Frank Kitson laid out the format for this type of conflict.

He was a veteran of Britain’s’ dirty colonial wars as the British Empire collapsed in the twenty years after World War Two.

Long before the Pentagon came up with the term “collateral damage” these innocent musicians who played to boisterous teenagers across the sectarian divide were just that.

I became acquainted with the salient facts of this atrocity many years ago when I was a journalist at An Phoblacht.

Of course, we knew that it was a failed black op and that the British Army was directly involved and that they had managed the spin in the aftermath.

Now the facts of this atrocity have been taken to a global audience.

I recently watched the Netflix Documentary and I was struck by the quiet dignity of Stephen Travers in particular.

If you haven’t seen it then you really should.

Stephen’s book on the subject is a must read for anyone who wants to become fully informed about what the British state inflicted upon these young guys in 1975.

Full disclosure, we share the same publisher.

The massacre was a classic SAS operation:

Slaughter And Slander.

The idea was for the bomb to go off after the van had passed through the bogus British Army checkpoint.

The spin would have been that the much-loved band had been transporting an IRA bomb and that it was an “own goal” explosion.

Of course, in that scenario, the five members of the band would all be dead and unable to defend themselves from the British smears.

Instead, the bomb exploded prematurely as it was being placed in the van killing two of the UVF terrorists.

This would have strengthened the hand of the British demand that the Border be sealed with methods that are not usually available to a democracy.

There weren’t meant to be any survivors from this planned massacre, but there were.

The key fact that Stephen Travers remembered about that awful night was the clipped English accent of the officer in charge of the killers.

However, the authorities appeared very keen for Stephen to forget this crucial piece of evidence.

It is the opinion of many that the English officer in question was the late Captain Robert Nairac.

It has been established that he was a close associate of Loyalist killer Robin Jackson.

Several British Army whistleblowers, including Fred Holroyd, has stated that Captain Nairac was directing the work of Mid-Ulster UVF of which Jackson was a leading member.

Nairac was assigned to 14^th Intelligence Company a unit that was gamed out in the pages of Low Intensity Operations.

This Sandhurst trained sociopath was executed by the IRA in 1977 after he was apprehended in South Armagh by local Volunteers.

He was probably the type of officer that Kitson had envisaged when he had written his counterinsurgency textbook seven years earlier.

The Netflix documentary and Stephen’s book are perfect antidotes to those who think that collusion was a Republican illusion.

Although he resisted it for many years Stephen Travers finally conceded that the events of that night defined his life.

He is now pursuing a court case against the Ministry of Defence: “I don’t think I have a purpose to live other than this”.

He is a good man.