'Tá mé ag imeacht': The Execution of Myles Joyce and Its Afterlives

On 15 December 1882, three men—Myles Joyce, Patrick Joyce, and Patrick Casey—were executed in Galway Jail having been found guilty of the infamous Maamtrasna Murders. The previous August, five members of the Joyce family—John Joyce, his wife Bridget Casey, his mother Margaret, his daughter Peggy, and his son Michael Joyce—were brutally murdered in their home in the isolated Maamtrasna townland, on the borders of Counties Galway and Mayo. Ten men were accused, two of whom later turned ‘queen’s evidence’ against their fellow accused; as a result of the week-long trials held in Dublin in November, three men were sentenced to be hanged and five given prison sentences of life.