MORE than 40 summers ago, Stephen Travers barely survived one of the grimmest massacres of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Miami Showband killings, in which five people were shot dead, three of them band members. Travers, the bass player, was severely wounded. This spring sees the beginning of a civil court action for compensation. He and his partners in the action are quietly confident of victory.

In the early hours of July 31, 1975, the Dublin-bound minibus in which Travers and four of his band colleagues were travelling was stopped on an army checkpoint seven miles north of Newry on the main A1 road to the south. They were ordered to line up next to the vehicle. It seemed like just another routine stop. Travers, the band’s newest member, remembers seeing an English army officer, who spoke with a crisp, “posh” accent, arriving to take charge.

The soldiers who now confronted them wore the uniforms of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the British Army’s largest regiment. Two of them attempted to hide a bomb in the van but it exploded prematurely, killing them outright. Stunned and suddenly panic-stricken the others opened their guns on the musicians.

The Herald:

The three band members who died were Tony Geraghty, vocalist Fran O’Toole and Brian McCoy. Hurled through the air by the explosion, Travers was struck by a dum-dum bullet [an expanding round designed to produce a larger wound], which caused severe internal injuries. Face-down in a field, he listened helplessly to the sound of his friends being finished off.

He pretended he was dead but was convinced his last moment had come as he heard one of the gunmen approach him. But then a voice called from the roadside, “Come on, those bastards are dead. I got them with dum-dums”, and the killers disappeared.

At least four of the gunmen belonged, or had belonged, to the UDR, but all of them were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group which is estimated to have killed more than 500 people during the Troubles. In time, two UDR soldiers and one former soldier would be convicted of the murders and given life sentences.

Travers slowly, steadfastly rebuilt his life. This week an updated version of his biography, The Miami Showband Massacre, is published by Scots-based Frontline Noir, the only UK publisher willing to take it on.

At the heart of the 1975 killings, it is alleged, lies collusion between the authorities in Ulster and paramilitary organisations. The book’s back cover makes this plain. The atrocity, it says, “is now known to have been carried out by the Glenanne Gang, a British-protected assortment of serving police officers, locally-recruited British Army soldiers and well-known assassins and Loyalist paramilitaries.”

The massacre “stands as an obscene monument to Collusion between official British security services and Loyalist terrorists … At the time the very notion of Collusion was often thought of as ‘conspiracy theory’. Now, of course, even mainstream media considers Collusion as the last untold story of The Troubles.”

The book notes that a series of tribunals of inquiry had unravelled the “true extent” of collusion and quotes Travers as saying: “The death squad of 31 July had close ties with the British security forces. The fact that the officer who arrived on the scene had an English accent and immediately took charge of the operation was ignored.

“It was never satisfactorily explained why all of them were armed with standard-issue British weapons and uniforms. When it was brought up in court, both Des [McAlea, the massacre’s only other survivor] and I were told that we were wrong in our descriptions of the English officer. This, to me, proves that they either refused to believe the possibility of collusion or, as I have always firmly believed, there was a cover-up.”

The book asserts that the aim of the mission that night, as the band returned from a gig in Banbridge, “was to shame a secular band as bomb-runners and give legitimacy to stepping up border controls". The band, made up of Catholics and Protestants, was popular on both sides of the border. The fallout from the massacre crippled Northern Ireland's live music scene for decades.

Now, Travers and McAlea, and the widows of Fran O’Toole and Brian McCoy, are suing the Ministry of Defence and the Police Service of Northern Ireland [PSNI] over alleged collusion with the loyalist killers. The claim centres on a contention that the UDR did not do enough to prevent collusion with loyalists, and is based on documents uncovered by various campaign groups. The case is expected to begin in the spring at the High Court in Belfast.

“The case has been going on now for about six years,” Travers told the Sunday Herald. “The bottom line is that the MoD and the RUC – the PSNI, as it is now – were responsible in law for the actions of the soldiers and the police.

“I think we may be the only people taking court action that already have three murder convictions against the security forces, which is very important. There are other cases in which the dogs in the street know who did it, but our case has convicted three of them, and another two killed themselves on the night.

“There’s no question that the security forces were involved. We have overwhelming evidence that the killers were armed, paid and facilitated by the security forces, who also staged a cover-up. Some of the evidence we have is shocking.

“This is a civil case for compensation for 42 years of mental and physical torture, the kind that is never out of your mind. The bottom line is to prove that the killings were part of a systemic policy. That would be a big thing for us. Until recently the MoD blamed ‘rotten apples’ for what happened but today the shoe is on the other foot. Everybody knows that collusion happened. It has become completely undeniable.”

*The Miami Showband Massacre: A survivor’s search for the truth, by Stephen Travers and Neil Fetherstonhaugh; Frontline Noir, £9.99.