Typical southerner dragged into the North’s mayhem

Trauma Miami Showband Massacre survivor to give Arthur Griffith Lecture

It’s not the physical scars which Stephen Travers dwells on, but the mental.

That’s not to say that the physical injuries suffered by the Miami Showband bassist weren’t significant. He was shot with a ‘dum dum’ - a bullet altered by the UVF gunman to inflict maximum damage upon impact.

“A bullet exploded into 16 pieces inside me, and part of it exited the other side of me and punctured my lung,” says Stephen, now aged 72. “There’s been physical difficulties, but it’s the post traumatic stress disorder and the trauma - there’s no such thing as a cure for that. PTSD needs to be managed rather than cured. There are days when, as I said in my victim impact statement, I quoted the John Denver song: ‘Some days are diamonds, some days are stone.’

Just as the names Claudy, Enniskillen and Omagh brought to mind bombings rather than towns for many years, the name Miami Showband now seems unimaginable without the appendage ‘Massacre’. Particularly so for generations too young to recall the band’s enormous popularity on the live music circuit, on both sides of the border.

An acclaimed Netflix documentary has managed to highlight just how big they were at the time, with Fran O’Toole as their charismatic frontman. Without delving too deeply into the grubby details of the attack, the UVF’s Glenanne Gang - which included serial murderer Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson - along with British State forces conspired to plant a bomb on the band’s tour bus as they returned to Dublin from a gig in Banbridge. With a British officer in charge - widely thought to be spook Robert Nairac, later killed by the IRA - the gang mounted a fake checkpoint and ordered the band members off the bus to stand by the side of the road. When it came to planting the bomb under the driver’s seat however, the device detonated prematurely. Two bombers - Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville - died instantly while the band members were blasted into a field below road level. In the chaos that ensued the remaining gunmen - using weapons originally issued by British State security forces - sprayed the band members with gunfire. Singer Fran O’Toole, guitarist Tony Geraghty and trumpeter Brian McCoy were murdered. Against the odds, Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived.

Originally from South Tipperary, Stephen admits that in the ‘70s he was “a typical southerner, who knew nothing about the Troubles”. Forty-eight years later he is alive to the North’s complex dynamics and a tireless advocate for reconciliation. He intends to share the insights he’s gained when he delivers the annual Arthur Griffith Lecture in Cavan County Museum next Wednesday evening, April 12.

Along with Eugene Reavey, Stephen set up an organisation called Truth And Reconciliation Platform (TARP) to give victims of the conflict “from all communities” the opportunity to talk. Eugene’s three brothers aged between 17 and 24 were murdered as they watched TV in their family home in Whitecross, Co Armagh in 1976 - months after the Miami killings.

“They just decided to murder these Catholics,” Stephen recalls of the atrocity, again carried out by the Glenanne Gang. “On the same night the Reaveys were murdered the O’Dowds were murdered 20-odd miles further on - it was the same people in both of those murders.”

By then the conflict was generating its own murderous momentum.

“The Troubles at that stage were at a point where there was very little anyone could do to stop the thing,” says Stephen.

He admires the late SDLP leaders John Hume and Seamus Mallon for doing all they could to try to halt the killings, which culminated in the peace process. With the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement now upon us, the Celt wonders if Stephen had mixed views on it. Some of those convicted in the Miami Showband Massacre were amongst the circa 400 prisoners released under the agreement.

“I was fully behind that,” he says. “Some of the people who were involved in our incident were released - I was happy, I didn’t care if they had never went to jail in the first place,” he says.

He adds: “The reality of the Good Friday Agreement is that we now have something to work with - but it wasn’t seen as that. They were all clapping each other on the backs saying isn’t it great we’ve achieved this? But we didn’t use it as a springboard as it should have been used - that’s the problem.”

With the public desperate for peace to endure did he ever feel pressure as a victim to keep quiet? He says that such a stance is “a dreadful tactical error”.

“It’s a popular misconception to say, we shouldn’t be bringing it up again, these people [survivors], they’ll be gone soon.

“It’s the future,” he says warning lessons of the past must be heeded.

“There are signs that it may erupt again, that there are people very discontented, with for instance this Windsor Agreement, and there’s people telling them they should be out, even if it’s riots on the streets, burning cars, that turns into - as we saw with young Lyra McKee [fatally shot by dissident Republicans in Derry in 2019] - somebody gets killed and it escalates and you come to the point where the momentum is so much that you can’t stop it.”

The most blatant attempt to draw a line under the past is the British Government’s controversial Legacy Bill that’s currently passing through Parliament.

“Ours was one case - there were over 3,600 people killed over the so-called Troubles and over 40,000 people injured. How can you just dismiss them and say they should go away and forget it and get on with their lives? You may as well be telling someone with terminal cancer go away and forget it and get on with your life. You can’t do that.”

Stephen doesn’t believe the policy is motivated by an urge to protect soldiers.

“They couldn’t care less about their soldiers, they pretend they do, but they’ve used them as cannon fodder for centuries,” says Stephen, whose father fought in the British Army. “Their problem is that it would expose what the policy was. They are protecting themselves.

“If they would only realise the British government today, they are not responsible for the Troubles, they are not responsible for the atrocities, they’re not responsible for siding with one faction or another. They can put their hands up and say, ‘Terrible things were done in the past and let’s look at them and make sure they’re not going to happen again.

He describes it as the “most unjust” legislation since the Penal Laws and warns: “It will play in to the hands of those who advocate violence as the only response to injustice. That’s what’s going to happen.”

He admits that occasionally when he discusses the Showband Massacre, some people ask: ‘What about the killings by republicans?’

“We seem to have this political correctness where we’re afraid to mention one atrocity by one particular group without mentioning another - we shouldn’t have to do that. We should be able to stand up and talk about one atrocity - whether it’s the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings, whether it’s Belturbet, whether it’s Enniskillen or Omagh or any of these - without having to feel obliged to also counteract it, by going - ‘Having said that, we must also speak about an atrocity carried out by somebody else’. That is unhealthy - it’s not only ‘whataboutery’ but what actually happens is that one seems to cancel out the other and the conclusion is people say, ‘Oh look, it was a crazy time and they were all at it, they were all killing each other - so just draw a line under it.’

“That’s not right, we shouldn’t have to do that. We should be able to talk about these things in isolation.”

Politically speaking he “hopes” to see an ‘agreed united Ireland’ in the future. However, he thinks an important first step - even before reconciliation with unionists - is the reconciliation between nationalists, north and south.

“We should look at the hurt that’s felt by northern nationalists when people turned their backs on them and left them to deal with a situation that basically held them as second class citizens.” He says nationalists’ pain caused by partition is “conveniently” overlooked but must be acknowledged.

“That’s a reconciliation that’s never ever mentioned.”

He says he was guilty of it too.

“The North may as well have been the North Pole until it impacted on my life.”