In August 1882, a brutal mass murder in a remote valley in the west of Ireland shocked the world. At Maamtrasna, a family, the Joyces, were attacked in their home. The victims ranged from a teenage girl to an 80-year-old woman. The police quickly suspected that the killers had been neighbours and even relatives of the Joyce family. However, a motive was elusive. As wider Irish society was shocked by the killings, injustice was followed by injustice.
Indeed, the trials would soon overshadow the crime itself, unfolding into one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in the legal history of Ireland or the UK. In this episode, Margaret Kelleher joins me to explore this intriguing case. We dig into the dark events that unfolded in Maamtrasna in the summer of 1882 and examine why an innocent man, Myles Joyce, was sent to the gallows after a trial conducted entirely in English, a language he could neither speak nor understand.
The episode reveals what we know happened in Maamtrasna on that fateful night and how perjury and a rush to convict rather than find genuine justice lay at the heart of this intriguing case. This is the story of how a brutal murder in an isolated mountain community ended up having massive political implications, leaving a legacy that continues to reverberate today.
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My guest is Margaret Kelleher, Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin (research profile: https://people.ucd.ie/margaret.o.kelleher). She is a board member of the Museum of Literature Ireland (https://moli.ie/) and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her latest book, Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream, is forthcoming from UCD Press in the Autumn of this year. Her monograph Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (UCD Press, 2018) was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books in Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2019, and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Michel Déon Prize. She was Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library from 2022-2023 and Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge from 2023-2024.
Sound by Kate Dunlea
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