The Troubles: Three members of a popular cabaret band and two gunmen are killed during a botched paramilitary attack in Northern Ireland

On July 31, 1975, the Troubles: Three members of a popular cabaret band and two gunmen are killed during a botched paramilitary attack in Northern Ireland.

During the six years from the onset of the Troubles until the July 1975 attack, there had never been an incident involving any of the showbands.

During The Troubles in Ulster (1920–1922), the capital Belfast saw major communal violence, mainly between Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist civilians. More than 500 were killed and more than 10,000 became refugees, mostly Catholics. For the next fifty years, Northern Ireland had an unbroken series of Unionist Party governments. There was informal mutual segregation by both communities, and the Unionist governments were accused of discrimination against the Irish nationalist and Catholic minority. In the late 1960s, a campaign to end discrimination against Catholics and nationalists was opposed by loyalists, who saw it as a republican front. This unrest sparked the Troubles, a thirty-year conflict involving republican and loyalist paramilitaries and state forces, which claimed over 3,500 lives and injured 50,000 others. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a major step in the peace process, including paramilitary disarmament and security normalisation, although sectarianism and segregation remain major social.

The year 1975 was marked by an escalation in sectarian attacks and a vicious feud between the two main loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). On 4 April 1974, the proscription against the UVF had been lifted by Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.