Stephen Travers

The Bass Player

A blind man shows me how he changed the lives of thousands on the other side of the world through his own life-changing experience in an impoverished, working-class area of Derry.

In 2008, following the success of the 2005 anniversary concert and the 2007 publication of the book, we agreed to do a series of Miami Showband concerts. Des McAlea (also known by his stage name of Des Lee) fronted the band on lead vocals and saxophone, and it was great to have our original drummer, Ray Miller, with us too. I was on bass guitar and, as the band leader, I put the 1975 Miami Showband set list together, which included the hits of that time as well as the classic pop, rock and, especially, the soul music that Fran had made his own. I wanted us to sound as close as possible to the way we did back in the day. My aim was to be authentic without being a tribute to ourselves, so we had a fine line to tread. The veteran Belfast vocalist, keyboard and saxophone player Barry Woods was added to the line-up, along with an ancillary keyboard player for vocal harmonies. I also recruited my old friend, the legendary guitarist and vocalist Johnny Fean from Horslips, to complete the band.

Our first concert was scheduled for 16 September 2008, at Vicar Street. We had played there three years previously and we were confident of another great reception in Dublin. However, our concert at the Grand Opera House in Belfast, which was scheduled for the following night, had sold out very quickly and we were conscious that it would be very emotional, not only for the audience, but also for the band. We were determined to make our first date in Northern Ireland since the 1975 tragedy a very special and enjoyable occasion. Our guests were the showband legend Brendan Bowyer, as well as Ireland’s first Eurovision Song Contest winner, Dana, and Les McKeown of the Bay City Rollers. We also augmented our brass section with the fabulous Kaye twins, Paul and Gerry, who had played with the Miami back in 1977. Des, Ray and I did not want the Belfast concert to be a commercial enterprise, so we decided to donate the profits. Having gone through a long list of charities, each one as deserving as another, we eventually settled on Children in Crossfire, subject to meeting its founder, Richard Moore.

In 1970 the Ministry of Defence (MoD) deployed the rubber bullet as a ‘non-lethal’ form of riot control on the streets of Northern Ireland. Designed to be aimed low or into the ground to reduce their velocity, rubber bullets were deemed more effective and less controversial than live ammunition, but, in reality, they were often fired at close range and directly at heads and upper bodies, so it wasn’t long before they caused a fatality. In April 1972 11-year-old Francis Rowntree was killed when, without warning, a soldier firing into a crowd in West Belfast shot the boy in the head. Giving evidence at the inquest, Alan Hepper, a Ministry of Defence engineer, declared that there had been limited testing on rubber baton rounds before their introduction in July 1970. Just weeks after the killing of Francis Rowntree, a British soldier shot 10-year-old Richard Moore in the face at point-blank range with a rubber bullet, blinding him for life, as he ran home from school with his friends in the Creggan estate in Derry.

One evening after rehearsals on the outskirts of Antrim town, we went over to the Ramble Inn restaurant on the Lisnevenagh Road for dinner. We had arranged for Richard Moore to join us. Although the restaurant was very busy, I suddenly became aware of a powerful presence, as if an electric charge had gone through the room. Holding on to a companion’s arm, Richard Moore moved confidently towards our table and, before I could stand up to shake hands, I was greeted with a hearty slap on the back. ‘How’s it going, mucker?’ he said in an unmistakable Derry accent.

He pitched the idea for the Grand Opera House concert profits going to his organisation but, as far as we were concerned, he didn’t need to make any pitch. He then invited me to visit his offices in Derry the following day, to learn more about the work of Children in Crossfire. When I got there the next morning everything had been meticulously prepared: slideshow, videos, brochures, etc. Even though Richard is blind, he can read the room better than most and after about fifteen minutes into the video presentation, he said, ‘Stop the video. This is not really telling you what we do. Will you come to Africa with me and see for yourself?’ My immediate answer was, ‘When are we going?’

‘You most certainly are not,’ Anne said when I told her that I was going to Africa with a blind man. ‘It’s too dangerous. Who do you think you are – Indiana Jones?’ But Anne didn’t realise that I would have gone to the moon with Richard Moore. Moreover, I was fascinated at the thought of crossing the equator for the adventure of a lifetime with this remarkable man. I managed to persuade her, but only on condition that I took every insect and mosquito repellent available with me and got all of the required vaccinations. On the day of my departure, Anne presented me with a stylish straw hat that she bought for me at the upmarket Brown Thomas store in Cork to protect me from any dive-bombing bugs and off I went on a whistle-stop tour of Tanzania with Richard Moore and two other observers, Morris Crumb and Andrew Clenahan, and a few words in Swahili under my dapper new chapeau.

‘You’ll be put through the wringer every day,’ Richard warned, ‘but I promise you’ll have a comfortable place to sleep at night.’ He was true to his word. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the awful poverty, suffering and destitution. At the Ocean Road Cancer Institute in Dar es Salaam, I met Dr Trish Scanlan, a brilliant young Irish doctor from Wicklow, who could have chosen a much easier and more lucrative life but had instead taken on the incredibly difficult task of treating Tanzanian children with cancer while running the only hospital in East Africa that provided chemotherapy free of charge at that time. Within just two years, the survival rate of children in her care rose from 27 per cent to around 60 per cent. It was a stunning achievement that might not have been realised without the support of people like Richard Moore and Children in Crossfire. We managed to visit eight projects during my visit and each one was heartbreaking, unique and inspiring. I found the orphanage in Dar es Salaam particularly upsetting as my own beloved father had been orphaned as a child.

At first I thought Children in Crossfire was somehow connected to child soldiers, but Richard told me that, although the name refers to the crossfire of poverty, it was inspired by his own experience. A child caught in crossfire himself, Richard, remarkably, insists that his blindness has been a positive experience because of the people in his life – his family and the people of Creggan, a nationalist area up on the hill overlooking the Bogside and Derry City. His memories of Creggan are particularly warm and wonderful. He breaks into a wide smile as he recalls being ‘a football fanatic’ growing up with other families as large as his own. In those days there weren’t many cars, so the children had the whole street to themselves to play ‘football and Red Rover and hide-and-seek’. While he claims he wasn’t a natural academic, he says he was a very happy student, especially whenever he got a lift to school from his brother in Doherty Butchers’ van. ‘Even though it was only a couple of minutes’ walk, it was fantastic to get a lift. I was a celebrity in a butcher’s van,’ he laughs.

Happy-go-lucky but increasingly aware that he was living in a war zone, Richard knew that Derry had changed. With burnt-out cars and barricades built of rubble, shootings and bombings, the city was tense. Bloody Sunday had happened in 1972, and three or four people living within a minute of his home were murdered on that awful day. He constantly saw IRA men with masks and rifles patrolling the streets and, as incredible as it sounds now, it seemed normal then that a young child could distinguish the different types of weapons they carried.

On the day he was shot, there was a heavy military presence in the area. Running home from school, Richard and his friends decided to sprint up the football field just as they had so often before. When the soldier fired a rubber bullet from the army lookout post built beside his school to watch over the nearby police station, it struck Richard on the bridge of his nose and the ten-year-old lost his right eye and was totally blinded in his left.

Richard’s parents, devout Catholics who attended Mass every day, were apolitical and totally anti-violence. They did everything they could to protect their family from the Troubles. ‘But it didn’t matter,’ he says, ‘the Troubles found us.’ His father, an unemployed shoemaker, was devastated by what had happened to his son. When the doctors told him Richard would never see again, he asked, ‘Can I give him my eyes?’ Years later, Richard recalled his father’s words and called his autobiography Can I Give Him My Eyes? It was a statement of love that would sustain Richard for the rest of his life.

Despite his remarkable positivity, important questions remained. Why did it happen? Why did the soldier shoot him? For over thirty years, Richard developed his own narrative, imagining the soldier who shot him to be a squaddie, some naive teenager from England on the edge of a no-go area in Derry, scared out of his wits. But it was not a terrified boy who blinded him: it was a 34-year-old British army captain, Charles Innes, who discharged the lethal missile. This unexpected and inconvenient truth challenged Richard and led to a lot of torturous soul-searching. Why was an army captain firing rubber bullets at children that day? Where in the rules of engagement is a soldier permitted to use rubber bullets when there is no imminent danger? Clearly, it was an unlawful action by a British army officer who would later say that he fired the bullet to get the children to ‘bugger off home’.

Years later, having finally tracked him down, Richard forgave Charles and now considers him a friend, ‘a good friend’. It may be challenging for many, if not for most, to understand that, for Richard Moore, ‘anger serves no useful purpose’. Nevertheless, while he forgives the soldier, Richard is quick to point out that ‘it does not mean what Charles did was right’. Forgiveness, according to Richard Moore, is not justification. ‘If a child throws a stone through a car window, you won’t tell the child that it’s right, but you will forgive the child, won’t you?’ he says. ‘I am not saying my way is the only way, I’m just saying it worked for me. I am happy. We are good friends.’

When the files were eventually declassified in 2013, it was discovered that the Ministry of Defence knew that rubber bullets were far more dangerous than they had led the public to believe. Before they were used on the streets of Northern Ireland, tests on rubber bullets confirmed that they were lethal, but the MoD had stated otherwise. The British government has a responsibility to protect those who live under its jurisdiction, but in Richard’s case it actually went out of its way to cover up evidence that proves it failed to protect him. ‘I would be able to see today if those weapons hadn’t been deployed on the streets. They shouldn’t have brought them onto the streets. I’m alive to talk about it. Other children are not alive to talk about it,’ he told the BBC in 2013.

During the Troubles there was no therapy or trauma counselling for children like Richard Moore or their families. It was his teachers, friends and parents who made it possible for him to realise his potential. Contemplating the children in Africa and South America who now have food, clean water and access to education, he says it is not because of him or Children in Crossfire, it’s because of the people who showed him love and compassion at that terrible time. ‘When you’ve been through the wringer, you’d be hard pushed not to learn from it, not to understand what worked and what didn’t, what helped and what didn’t. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been blessed.’

I was indeed put ‘through the wringer’ in East Africa, where I saw poverty and deprivation on a scale that I could never have imagined. The suffering I witnessed was overpowering. I was taken to the Ocean Road Cancer Institute on my very first day. As our small convoy approached the compound, Richard asked me if I could see the hospital, but I told him I could only see a few small, basic outbuildings, which I began to describe, but he smiled and said, ‘We’ve arrived.’

The intense dry heat hit me the moment we stepped out of the Toyota Landcruiser. I couldn’t believe that this was a hospital, let alone a cancer care centre. Dr Trish Scanlan was standing on the porch with a broad, welcoming Irish smile, surrounded by a cluster of little children, some holding her hands and others holding on to her doctor’s white coat, and all excited and shy at the same time. There was an overwhelming sense of joy at Richard’s arrival. We were soon inside the tiny ward that housed just fourteen beds for thirty-seven children. Some parents sat outside on the porch while others kept vigil at the bedsides of their children, some of whom, even I could see, were not long for this world.

I accompanied Richard and Trish as they stopped by every bed, offering words of comfort to a child or a parent. Even if I knew their language, I would have been tongue-tied, so all I could offer was an awkward smile. I was way out of my depth. I was just a bass player. All of a sudden, I felt a tiny hand wrap itself around my little finger. I looked down and saw a small boy, no more than 3 years of age, looking sideways up at me. Smiling, I immediately hunkered down to say hello, but as I did he turned his full face towards me and, for an instant, I recoiled in horror, then immediately composed myself. The child had a large cancerous tumour on the side of his face.

In that instant, I knew everything was connected. I picked little Edwin up and soon I was carrying an even tinier little girl around in my arms too. They were both beaming when Dr Trish came over to have a few words. I asked Trish how my new little buddies were doing and, like most Irish people, I expected her to tell me that they were doing very well and on the mend. The children didn’t understand what we were saying and my Swahili extended only to a few simple words like jambo (hello), ahsante (thank you) and kwaheri (goodbye). Trish took the little boy’s hand in hers and said, ‘Ah, poor Edwin came to us too late, but we got madam here in time. The cancer was in her eye, which, as you can see, we had to remove and now she is doing very well indeed.’ I was stunned, but I was also grateful for the doctor’s candour. The little girl stretched her hands out to Trish, who took her in her arms, but Edwin was fixated by my new straw hat. When I placed it on his head, his eyes lit up, and I realised that I could actually help him to forget his woes for a little while just as we did in the dancehalls during the Troubles, so I gave him the hat that Anne bought me just a few days before and told him he looked really cool, and he smiled and put his little arms around me and hugged me. Although little Edwin has long since passed away, his strength and courage remain with me forever and I pray for him, and to him, every day.

Two days before we left Dar es Salaam, the Irish ambassador to Tanzania, Anne Barrington, invited us to dinner; she suggested meeting at O’Willie’s Irish Whiskey Tavern, the only Irish pub in Tanzania at the time. I was physically and emotionally exhausted by our journey from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza and on up to Lake Victoria and from the distressing events and sights I’d witnessed along the way. I was looking forward to a relaxing evening, but to my utter dismay there was a huge banner over the main entrance of the pub, which read, ‘O’Willie’s Welcomes the Miami Showband’. To make things worse, the place was packed to the rafters with Irish, British, Australians, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Africans, among many others. After dinner I noticed musical instruments had been set up on the stage in the main lounge and that Richard, along with my fellow voyagers Morris Crumb and Andrew Clenahan, were tuning up and getting ready to play. Richard is a fine singer and a talented guitarist. Andrew knows his way around a fretboard too and Morris is an experienced keyboard player. I was conscious that since the Miami Showband featured on the big banner, I would be expected to front the band – but while I’m a bass player, I’m a long way from being a singer, so I made every excuse possible to avoid getting up on stage. However, when they presented me with a five-string bass guitar and a bass amp, I threw caution to the wind and went for it. I even sang a few rock and roll classics, and the place rocked and everyone said it was the best night’s entertainment they’d ever had. There’s no accounting for taste, I thought to myself.

The real Miami Showband got a fabulous reception at Vicar Street in Dublin, but we were conscious that our concert in Belfast the following night was going to be very special and emotional for the band and for the audience. To our delight, the moment we walked on to the stage of the Grand Opera House, the entire audience stood up and cheered. It was not just a standing ovation. It was an outpouring of love for the Miami Showband that the people of Belfast had held in their hearts for us for over thirty-three years.

Stephen Travers has lived two lives. His first was as a young bass player, immersed in music, friendship, and the thrill of gigs on the road with the Miami Showband. But on July 31, 1975, that life shattered on the A1 road at Buskhill in County Down when a Loyalist gang ambushed the band, murdering three of his friends in an attack that would become one of the darkest moments of The Troubles. In the quiet aftermath, in a nearby field, Stephen awoke to his second life — as a survivor.

This second life led him down unexpected paths: as an author, composer, producer, and international speaker on peace and reconciliation. Over decades, he worked to support other survivors, challenge suspected state collusion, and seek justice in a landmark case against the British Ministry of Defence. In 2019, he co-founded the Truth and Reconciliation Platform (TaRP) which provides a space for survivors of the Troubles to speak about their experiences. 

Now, fifty years later, he has written The Bass Player, a love letter and eulogy for that first life. This book is both a deeply personal reckoning and a song for all those silenced by conflict, offering a path toward healing and, finally, peace. The Bass Player is published by New Island Press and was shortlisted in the 2025 Irish Book Awards, Biography of the Year.