The Maamtrasna murders 135 years on

Over 135 years after his execution, Myles Joyce, wrongfully accused of murdering a family of five in Maamtrasna, on the Mayo-Galway border, is to receive posthumous pardon. The Maamtrasna murders, which began as an act of mindless criminality, quicly acquired highly politicised overtones. The trials are covered at length in Myles Dungan's Conspiracy: Irish Political Trials:

'In early 1883 warders and inmates in Galway prison began to report strange sightings of a wraith-like middle-aged man protesting loudly at some perceived injustice. In a society accustomed to regular interaction with a thriving nether world this incorporeal manifestation was not altogether surprising. Many recognised the restless spirit and well understood his anguish. At least one warder offered as an excuse for turning up drunk for his days work the fact that he had needed to fortify himself for his regular encounters with the restless spirit of the man who had been cruelly and ham-fistedly hanged just a few months before. His name was Myles Joyce, a native of the small townland of Cappancreha on the Mayo-Galway border and, it was common knowledge in the west of Ireland, that he had been executed at the end of a sinister process, on the basis of the dubious evidence of a veritable rogues’ gallery of informers and turncoats. His ghost may have well have stalked the prison until it was demolished to make way for the magnificent Roman Catholic cathedral that stands on the site today. In such consecrated ground his spirit must surely rest in peace but rehabilitation had begun before he even died at the end of a hangman’s rope'.

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