Yesterday I was dandering down my bóithrín with the telephonic company a fine fella in my earphones.
I was speaking to Stephen Travers about his ongoing search for justice.
Obviously, like most Irish people of my generation, I know of the basic components of the Miami Showband massacre.
I was 17 at the time and I had a cousin down the country who was mad for them.
In terms of full disclosure, Stephen and I share the same publisher that is how we were put in touch
The last time that he and I had spoken would have been in early December last year.
It was then that I had brought up the possibility of the involvement of British soldier Robert Nairac in the atrocity that had scarred his life ever since.
At that point, there was no definitive proof to state with authority that the English officer who turned up at the massacre that night was the late Captain Nairac.
Then last week a bombshell was published.
Stephen said to me yesterday that he greeted the news with a mixture of “anger sadness and excitement”.
He was also keen to impress on me that the British people had been lied to about then facts surrounding the massacre.
“I lived in London for the best part of twenty years. More decent people you couldn’t meet. They’ve been lied to as well. We are taking this to court, but where is the redress for the British people? This was done in their name by their government.”
He took to Twitter to put this very pointed question out there.
The legal fight against the British state has been ongoing for eight years now.
However, Stephen was of the opinion that it was reaching the end-stage.
It is worth taking a step back and giving some thought to what Nairac was planning that night.
They wanted to use a group of young musicians to transport a bomb that would go off killing them and implicating the lads in IRA activity.
This was a SAS operation:
Slaughter And Slander.
If the operation had have gone to plan then the Miami Showband would have been all killed after they had left the checkpoint.
As well as losing their lives their reputation as uninvolved innocent lads would have been tarnished forever.
This was the type of “counter gang” operation that had been theorised about in the book “Low Intensity Operations”.
That the author was that very fine chap General Sir Frank Edward Kitson, GBE, KCB, MC & Bar, DL should surprise no one who knows of the machinations of the British state.
What happened at that roadside in 1975 was the product of a well-developed policy at the highest levels of the UK state.
Moreover, Captain Nairac was no Baldrick.
As the IRA statement said at the time unemployment didn’t force the ex-public schoolboy to come to Ireland “to play his counter-insurgency games”.
In the end, it cost him his life and he was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
Stephen wanted to stress to me that he wanted the remains of Captain Nairac to be returned to his family for a Christian burial.
That man who lived for his music has a generosity of spirit and forgiveness that I certainly couldn’t find in myself if I were in his position.
Oh, aon rud eile…
This September, or whenever Poppy Fest starts this year, just remember this, that campaign rosette for British militarism is for Nairac too.
Lest we forget…
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I see Prince Charles was in Israel for the Holocaust memorial.
Wasn’t his mum filmed/photographed with her father (Charles’ grandfather; a nazi sympathizer) in the garden of Sandringham practicing their nazi salutes in the 1930’s?
Read a book on this recently was really shocked by it didnt really know anything about it before i read the book hope this murdering bastards history is made clear
To win a war you have to be more evil then your opponent. Not sure who wrote that, but even now with the scourge of Muslin extremists, you have to fight fire with fire, and more often than not the innocent suffer the most.
Steven and the lads in the band were no caught in the crossfire.
They were innocents who were deliberately targeted as part of a Balck Op.
Being evil has never been a problem for Britain.
In fact, the country that invented the Concentration Camp is rather good at it…
Not entirely sure they did invent the concentration camp. I know, I know. The Boer War and all that!! I would however argue that many Indian Reservations in the USA were in effect concentration camps long before the Boer War.
The term “Concentration Camp” was a formal British term to describe what they did to civilians in the Second Boer War.
The technique was then copied by the Germans in South West Africa.
Your comparison with the Indian Reservations doesn’t pass serious scrutiny.
Think “utility function”.
That is a heartless and ill thought out remark on the genocide of countless native American people. I don’t care what words you use to describe it. Evicting a native population from their homeland to areas that had no ‘utilitarian’ use to the oppressors seems eerily similar to me to the treatment of Irish and Scots in the clearances and the treatment of Gypsies, homosexuals and Jews and anyone else deemed inferior by the Nazis. A reservation is a concentration camp by any other name. Ask a Palestinian.
You do yourself no credit by your words, words, words. Serious scrutiny is indeed called for.
You appear to have a serious comprehension deficit or you’re a troll.
The latter do not last long here.
Thats what i read they were murdered by the brits delibritley
It was not a comment on the band, but a general statement with regard how things are in war. Nice guys never win a war and the innocent will always be the victims.
Really ! What about British extremists ?
Are you trying to justify that shit? And Muslins?
Get a grip.
It is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee that the death-throes of the British Empire is being exposed for what it truly was. Stories such as this are no longer suppressed, or history re-written to paint the British forces as the “friendly Tommies” of past wars, but instead exposed for what they really are. Don’t get me wrong – war is never something worthy of celebration, but let’s not kid ourselves on that only the enemy are guilty of brutality. A topical case
in point is today’s 75th anniversary of the liberation of Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz Birkenau – although the brutality of the Nazis has been exposed, please don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that the Allies Forces never had their own methods of brutality.
It takes a very special type of person who, after the atrocities they have suffered, to forgive those that have committed such inhumane acts. Stephen Travers falls into that category, alongside many Jewish holocaust survivors who have dug into the deepest and darkest corners of both their heart and their soul to find even the tiniest grain of forgiveness.
Enjoyable wee read there Phil,thank you,appreciated.
Steven the following may interest you and shows exactly what you refereed to in your comment.
ie.Torture by the British and Allies.
Author: Ian Cobain.
Title: Cruel Britannia,A Secret History of Torture.
Well that has not got into the Israeli states thinking. Israel seem to act like Nazis, especially when it comes to the Palestinians
I find it all too convenient that Nairac was named as the British officer in charge of the operation that night. It all too easy to lay blame at the door of the dead.
Then again he was a bit of a cocky bastard and no doubt the type that would pull any stunt regardless of it’s insanity or brutality.
To be seen as the hero in the eyes of his paymasters and top derring do’er in “the Regiment” was what gave him his jollies. A certain Winston Churchill springs to mind.
Oh well, so sad, to bad, never mind.
Although Nairac devised this “Baldrick moment”, ultimately it goes right to the top of the British establishment which, in 1975, was ruled by (primarily) Harold Wilson with his sidekick being one James Callaghan – at that time, Foreign Secretary, but ultimately, a freemason. It’s entirely possible that Wilson himself was not entirely “kept in the loop”, but I’m prepared to bet that Callaghan and several of his Masonic bedfellows knew exactly what Nairac got up to, and probably vetoed the event that Nairac had planned.