Search Results for 'Myles Joyce'

Everything happens for a reason. Everything leaves a footprint in its wake.

Week VI

The horrific Maamtrasna murders, the arrest of 10 men, the rush to ‘justice’, the evidence of the Cappanacrehas (known to be bitter enemies of the murdered Joyces), the two informers Anthony Philbin and Thomas Casey (whose false evidence led to penal servitude for life for five innocent men, and the execution of one innocent man), was followed in minute detail not only throughout Ireland, but in Britain and among the Irish communities in America. Yet nowhere did it impact more than on the mountainside community of Maamtrasna .

The brutal killing of the Joyce family, the subsequent round up of the 10 accused, their trial and the sentencing of three men to hang, while the rest pleaded guilty and faced a life of penal servitude, gripped the public yet again when it had barely recovered from the Phoenix Park murders. In particular the evidence by the Cappanacrehas, and by Philbin and Casey understandably caused deadly resentment in Connemara, which still finds an echo today.

Then on August 17 the so called Maamtrasna Murders were committed. It was a crime that the local police dreaded not only because of its horrific nature, but because of the unlikelihood that the perpetrators would ever be found. Usually in a closeknit community, such as at Maamtrasna , the murderers would never be revealed, at least never to the police.

In early October 1884 a journalist from The New York Times, whom we only know by his initials HF, left Galway for Cong by steamer, in the company of Mr TP O'Connor, MP for Galway, and Mr Healy, MP for Monaghan.

A plan to kill a Tuam man in 1883 led directly to a total of nine deaths including six hangings, one of which is now believed to have been a miscarriage of justice, according to The Queen v Patrick O’Donnell, a new book by Connemara-based author, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, which is to be the basis of a forthcoming TG4 drama-documentary.

Galway City and County gaols were built at the beginning of the 19th century on a large site which took up most of Nuns Island. Construction was conditional on a right of way, the road all around the walls, also being built. James Hardiman, the historian, described it as follows: “The Prison …. Is built in the form of a crescent …. The interior of which is divided into eight wards ….. separated by walls which form so many radii of a circle, and, terminating in the rear of the governor’s house, bringing the whole range within many of his windows, by which means he can, at a single glance, survey the entire.”

In its very first workshop, the law, journalism and human rights students of the newly-launched NUIG Innocence Clinic this week observed the 5th Annual International Wrongful Conviction Day with a minute of silence to remember the hundreds of thousands of innocent people still awaiting justice worldwide.

Ballina Salmon Festival meeting