“You don’t have to die to lose your life.”
Having premiered on Friday, Netflix’s new documentary on one of the most horrific incidents that took place during The Troubles has generated a big reaction.
ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre depicts the events and aftermath of 31 July 1975, when five people were killed, including three members of Irish cabaret band The Miami Showband, on the A1 road at Buskhill in County Down.
Often referred to as ‘The Irish Beatles’, the band had revered status and weren’t regarded as a political outfit.
Of the six members, two were Protestants and the rest were Catholic, with religion never being an issue in the band.
As bassist Stephen Travers outlines in the documentary, when he was on stage, he didn’t see Catholic or Protestant faces, just people that wanted to enjoy themselves.
Travers was a guest on The Ray D’Arcy Show on Saturday evening, where he once again spoke eloquently and insightfully on the subject that changed his life.
D’Arcy referred to Travers’ admission that sometimes he thinks of his friends who died as “the lucky ones”, a statement that a visibly emotional Travers explained.
“Sometimes, yeah,” he noted.
“You don’t have to die to lose your life, you know? And if you loved your life so much – I was very, very carefree and my wife, Anne, she was an absolutely beautiful, carefree, pied piper-type person; everybody loved her, and I saw what that did.
“Sometimes, you wake up in the morning and it’s like Groundhog Day and you think; ‘Do I have to think about this?’, because people talk about flashbacks – I don’t have flashbacks.
“The thing is always in front of you. It’s part of your life, and it’s a life that you don’t want to lead sometimes, but without my wife and my daughter, I don’t think I’d be here.”
Clip via RTÉ
As the documentary notes, when Travers was researching the murders, he obtained documents released by the relevant authorities.
He also acquired a statement from the UVF, declaring that MI5 had tasked them with assassinating Charles Haughey.
“There’s a letter that has been in possession of the Irish government for the past 30 years, from the UVF, telling the Irish government that MI5 had asked the UVF if they would assassinate Charlie Haughey,” Travers said.
“They were telling our government about this because they wanted to let the government know that they didn’t want any hand, act or part in it.
“It’s on headed paper, I didn’t know if they used headed paper but apparently they did,” Travers continued.
“It’s dated the fifth of the eighth, 87, and it says; Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd were telling the truth when they revealed that British intelligence were behind killings and kidnappings.
“This was a letter complaining about the treatment of the UVF by MI5, who they admit in the letter that they were working with. They had been given faulty detonators, faulty bombs, by MI5 and they say, ‘as in the case of the Miami Showband’ – something as fundamental as this could have given us closure 30 years ago.”
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