Today in 1882, violence erupted in the remote valley of Maamtrasna on the Galway–Mayo border. In a rough stone cabin, five members of the Joyce family were slaughtered in a manner so brutal that news of it travelled far beyond the mountains. The victims were an 80 year old granny, a father and mother and their teenage son and daughter. Only a young boy survived long enough to give an account before dying of his wounds. The killings shocked Ireland, but they also sent ripples across the British Empire. In London, The Spectator newspaper declared that the murders revealed the existence in Ireland of peasants [quote] “who are scarcely civilised beings, far nearer to savages than any other white men… in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians.” Eight men from this Gaeltacht in Connacht were arrested. None spoke English with fluency, yet their trial was conducted entirely in that tongue. Three were condemned to hang. Five others saved their lives by pleading guilty. One of those sentenced to death was Maolra Seoighe, known to the authorities as Myles Joyce, a 40-year-old farmer. Illiterate and unable to understand the language of the court, he stood bewildered as his fate was decided. “Níl mé ciontach” (I'm not guilty) he cried out after sentence was passed. Even on the eve of execution, his two fellow prisoners admitted their own guilt but swore that Myles Joyce had no part in the murders. Yet the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl Spencer, didnt care. So, on the 15th of December 1882, Myles Joyce was hanged outside Galway Jail, protesting his innocence to the last. This travesty of justice resonated with an unlikely namesake of the victim. Writer James Joyce even championed the cause in an essay originally written in Italian ​"Ireland at the Bar" (L'Irlanda alla sbarra, 1907) “The figure of this bewildered old man, left over from a culture which is not ours, a deaf-mute before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.” He cites the injustice again in ​Finnegans Wake. The Maamtrasna murders and Maolra Seoighe/Myles Joyce execution remained a stain on the record of British justice in Ireland, emblematic of a system that disregarded the language, culture, and dignity of the people it governed. In 2018, President Michael D. Higgins issued a posthumous pardon for Myles Joyce, acknowledging his execution as a “shameful episode in Ireland and Britain’s history.” Buy the Dublin Time Machine a pint and support the DTM Book ko-fi.com/buchanandublintime…