To help Stephen Travers and the Truth and Reconciliation Platform build a safer, more peaceful, and tolerant future for everyone, please consider contributing to the Miami Showband Peace Centre GoFundMe appeal.
It was washing day at our house when I heard the news. With a confidence he describes as arrogance, he felt that sharing his traumatic experience might help other victims; he agreed, but on condition that he was doing so as a survivor. The sax player Des Lee, born Des McAlea, was blown clear and ran for help.
Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace, two former British intelligence officers who appear in the Netflix documentary, both raised suspicions of collusion with the British government. The band - and its audiences - crossed all social, religious, and political boundaries and was drawn from both sides of the Irish border. A child of Northern Ireland's Troubles recalls that fateful night when The Miami Showband was ambushed by the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group.
In the decades that followed, Stephen has pursued the truth about what happened with a passion for justice and peace for everyone affected by the Troubles. My mother was ironing, the quiet of our kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and then the uncharacteristically solemn voice of the man on the radio as he related to us the emerging details of what had happened in the wee hours of the morning, that on their way home from a gig, The Miami had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including heartthrob lead singer, Fran O’Toole. He would say what he has been saying now for 45 years - that "no community has a monopoly on suffering and loss.". A gig by the then up-and-coming Thin Lizzy at the Forrester’s Hall in his hometown of Carrick-on-Suir, where he got to talk to Phil Lynott about what it was like to be a musician, made up his mind.
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Netflix documentary, ReMastered – The Miami Showband Massacre, Miami Showband Peace Centre GoFundMe appeal. In 2017, Belfast’s High Court ordered police and the Ministry of Defence to release more than 80 types of document relating to the Miami Showband murders. He hopes the film will bring awareness of how “scare tactics against minorities” and politicians peddling false information can incite violence. They probably expected it, until that moment when they were ordered to get out of their Volkswagen minibus and stand by the roadside with their hands on their heads. On that summer night in 1975, what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as the rest of us.
Physically untouched and on the other side of the world, I am still visited by the anniversaries of atrocities in "our wee country, " the Northern Ireland that shaped me and scared me and scarred me - Bloody Sunday, the bombings of Omagh and Enniskillen, La Mon, Kingsmill, The Wayside Halt, Loughinisland, Greysteel, Warrenpoint - and too many more.
Bio. A man with a British accent appeared to be in charge.
Lead guitarist, Tony Geraghty, was shot in the back – five times - and in the back of the head twice. This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. Some day I might get to move back there permanently. The murder of a group of musicians at a bogus checkpoint shines light on Irish border disputes in a new documentary. When people came to see us, sectarianism was left outside the door of the dancehall.