James joyce, p.86
James Joyce, page 86
It was not that long since Joyce had been drawn to Italian revolutionary syndicalism, but he was harshly suspicious of the British Labour Party and movement, perhaps because of Fabian influence and a tendency to think of the Labour Party as an annex of the Liberal party.96
Maamtrasna: ‘Who Killed Myles Joyce?’
Joyce published in Il Piccolo della Sera of 16 September 1907 an article entitled ‘L’Irlanda alla sbarra’, translated by Conor Deane as ‘Ireland at the Bar’ and perhaps better by Adrian Hardiman as ‘Ireland in the Dock.’97 It is an account of the Maamtrasna murder trials of 1882, which Joyce uses as an image for the denial to Ireland of a hearing of its protests against English injustice.
On 19 October 1902, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Dudley, accompanied by the Countess, left Dublin in an entourage for a tour of the west of Ireland. It was not a cavalcade by carriage as in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode in Ulysses, but a journey by train to Galway, and thence by motor car: two Panhards and a Mors. The Unionist press deferentially chronicled the progress of viceroy and vicereine. They reached what was known as Joyce country, which lay between the villages of Leenane and Cong in north-west County Galway bordering Mayo (Maamtrasna itself became part of Mayo in 1898). On the morning of 21 October, the motorcade set off from Leenane through steep mountain roads: ‘The route followed had, for the greater part, never previously been traversed by motor cars, and the appearance of these vehicles naturally excited great curiosity on the part of the peasants’.98 The Irish Times reported that the ‘wild mountain road’ led to Maamtrasna, ‘a name famous some twenty years back by reason of one of the most shocking murders of the Land League days. The scene of the tragedy was pointed out to their Excellencies as they drove past. The whole environment was now of surpassing loneliness. Gloomy mountains loomed up on all sides, and vast expanses of boggy land extended on each side of the road.’99 At Derrypark, the viceregal party visited a lace school carried on by the parish priest under the auspices of the Congested Districts Board:
When their Excellencies left the school one of the most affecting incidents of the tour occurred. Amongst the crowd of peasants who had assembled on the roadside were three women, the wives of three men who were sentenced to penal servitude in connection with the Maamtrasna murders. Approaching their Excellencies the women pleaded for the release of their husbands. One of them, sobbing bitterly, seized Lady Dudley’s hands and poured out the story of a lonely life since her husband had been sent to prison. The other women were also demonstrative in their appeal, and their Excellencies were much affected by the scene. Lord Dudley assured the poor creatures that their petition would be carefully considered when he returned to Dublin.100
The Irish Times reported, ‘The bleak region charged with bleaker memory was then left behind, and the motor cars made rapid progress towards Cong.’101 What the accounts in the Daily Express and the Irish Times omitted was the fact that the women’s pleas were ‘in expressive Gaelic’, and an interpreter was quickly found.102
Three days later, having served all but one month of the twenty years to which a sentence of penal servitude equated, Martin Joyce, Patrick Joyce (John), and Thomas Joyce (Pat) were released from Maryborough Jail.103 They were taken by train to Dublin, and thence to Ballinrobe. Terrified of the crowd that waited to greet them, they asked to be taken in a covered wagon to the Cavalry Barracks. After midnight they headed off in the rain, making the eighteen-mile half circuit of Lough Mask that took them back at last to their homes in Cappanacreha, three miles beyond which lay Maamtrasna.104
With their release the bitterly contested events of 1882—the murders, the trials, and the sentences—flared back into public controversy for a final time. Unionist and nationalist papers carried opposing characterisations of Maamtrasna and its sequel. The Daily Express referred to the murders as ‘perhaps the most horrible occurrence in connection with the Irish land agitation’. The Freeman’s Journal, whose coverage carried full reports of the major speeches on the amendment to the address moved by Timothy C. Harrington on 23 October 1884, insisted that the murders were ‘unconnected with any agrarian or public question’.105
The one incontrovertible fact was the killings. On the night of 17–18 August 1882, five members of the family of John Joyce were slaughtered in their Maamtrasna habitation: Joyce, his mother, his wife, his daughter, and a son who lived for a while; a second son survived his injuries. The Maamtrasna murders created an immediate sensation. The killing of the Joyce family occurred in the enervated aftermath of the Phoenix Park murders on 6 May. Maamtrasna was investigated by the police and by newspapermen. On that was superimposed the disjuncture between the savagery of the murders and the beauty and remoteness of the setting.
Maamtrasna was inaccessible. The reporter for the Daily Express, given conflicting information on how best to reach it, went by the longer route through Oughterard and took fourteen hours to reach his destination: ‘The journey as regards time and distance was the longest I could have taken, and though I passed through scenery almost unsurpassed for wild majestic splendour, it was at the moment scarcely a compensation for the physical exhaustion and the risk of travelling unescorted through the most dangerous fastnesses of the Joyce country.’106
He rendered it a journey into the ever-deepening unknown: ‘Little as I knew of the goal to which I was tending when I left Dublin, my knowledge grew less and more perplexing as I approached.’ Maamtrasna ‘seems shut out from all other life by mountain chains and ranges, high, bleak, and strangely impressive, confusedly huddled, the fragments of an earlier world’. The house of John Joyce was ‘a hovel, his land a patch of potatoes and cabbage’: ‘There was nothing in the shape of furniture in the house, than which it is impossible to conceive anything meaner or more horrible as the habitation of human beings. No window threw light into the domicile. A hole in the wall of the second chamber gave it all the ventilation and illumination it possessed, and fire was simply made by burning peat on the floor, the smoke finding an exit by the little door.’107
Anthony Joyce and his brother John, sons of Maolra Joyce, were tenants of Lord Leitrim and regarded as interlopers by their neighbours: Anthony Joyce had previously feuded with his cousin Myles Joyce, one of the ‘Shaun’ Joyces whom the Maolra Joyces hated. They came forward, with John’s son Patrick claiming to have followed the murder gang over the mountainside to the house of John Joyce, to have witnessed the murders, and to be able to identify the murderers. All except two of the ten men they named were neighbours, and three were their own first cousins.108
George Bolton, then Crown Solicitor for Tipperary, was put in charge of the case. Notorious for his aggressive techniques and absence of scruple, Bolton was already deeply involved in the investigation into the Phoenix Park murders.
In Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail, two of the Maamtrasna prisoners, Anthony Philbin and Thomas Casey, turned ‘approvers’, meaning that they had agreed to inculpate their co-accused. Eight men, five bearing the surname Joyce, were tried for the murders.
Under the provisions of the Prevention of Crimes Act of 1882—for nationalists ‘the Coercion Act’—the prosecution could transfer a case out of the local area. The ten Maamtrasna prisoners were transferred from Galway to be tried by a special commission sitting in Green Street in Dublin comprising a judge and a jury made up of ‘Special Jurors’, who were propertied but by no means exclusively Protestant.109
By the time Myles Joyce stood trial, Patrick Joyce and Pat Casey had already been convicted and sentenced to death. Myles Joyce did not speak or understand English, and he had the benefit of an interpreter only at the beginning and end of the trial. He was convicted and sentenced to death at the end of the second day of his trial. When the interpreter explained the verdict to him, according to the report of the Daily Express, ‘the facility with which he spake, the easy, rapidly-changing and not ungraceful motion of his hands as he accentuated his declaration, combined with the strange, unusual, but sonorous sounds of the mountain Gaelic in which he apostrophised, as it were, heaven to bear testimony to his freedom from guilt, made a remarkable impression on the court.’110
FIGURE 15.1. Myles Joyce. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, ALB40.
The remaining prisoners, encouraged by Fr Michael McHugh, the curate of Clonbur, pleaded guilty in an equivocal plea bargain. Their death sentences were commuted to penal servitude for life. ‘At the last moment’, the Liberal viceroy, Lord Spencer, received ‘a memorial or quasi-memorial through the Freeman’s Journal to say Myles Joyce was not guilty and that the other two would state that on the scaffold’. Spencer, who had granted the reprieve to the prisoners who had pleaded guilty in the face of considerable pressure, declined the memorial on behalf of Myles Joyce.111
Three days before the date set for the executions in Galway Jail, Patrick Joyce and Patrick Casey made statements exculpating Myles Joyce. The three men were hanged in the exercise yard of Galway Jail on 15 December 1882. Myles Joyce, who paused at the base of the scaffold to say, ‘Ara, tá mé ag imeacht’ (I am going), continued volubly to protest his innocence, whether to the functionaries carrying out the execution or to the reporters who were present. Perhaps because he persisted in his protests, the execution was botched. Marwood, the executioner, struggled for a minute or two to disengage the rope, which had slipped down Myles Joyce’s pinioned arm, and the prisoner died of strangulation.112
T. P. O’Connor wrote, in his somewhat facile manner, ‘That scene will live in Irish memory to the end of time’, but its impact was anything but immediate. There was a marked revulsion within mainstream nationalism against atrocities. O’Connor wrote, ‘The outbursts of bloody passion which had followed the arrest of Mr. Parnell had left behind feelings of profound horror, and these feelings were transformed into a sense of sickened loathing by the Maamtrasna massacre.’113 Horror over the Phoenix Park murders conditioned the initial response to the Maamtrasna convictions, which the nationalist press largely welcomed.114 While there was a certain unease from the moment of his conviction,115 two years supervened before a general public outrage at the fate of Myles Joyce took hold. His death became the subject of a time-lagged retro-politicisation. This came about because of the sequence of disclosures from 1884 about the trial which merged with the unsettling narrative of Myles Joyce being taken to execution.
On 8 August 1884 Thomas Casey, one of the approvers, made a public confession of his perjury in the church in Tourmakeady to a congregation assembled for a confirmation during the annual visitation of the Archbishop of Tuam. He gave an interview to Edward Byrne of the Freeman’s Journal, as did Anthony Philbin. Both elaborated on the role of George Bolton, who was at that time the subject of unsavoury disclosures concerning his personal life.116 Spencer stood over the convictions. He became the object of increasing public opprobrium in Ireland. Timothy Harrington was the politician principally responsible for pressing the issue of Maamtrasna. He attacked the trials in a series of letters to the Freeman’s Journal from August to October 1884,117 subsequently published in book form.
Edward Ennis, a nationalist barrister, came upon the discarded brief of one of the prosecuting counsel in Green Street Courthouse. It contained the undisclosed statements of Patsy Joyce, the boy who had survived, and Michael Joyce, the boy who had lingered before dying, that the murderers wore bright clothes and had their faces blackened, which undermined the concerted prosecution evidence that the attackers had worn dark clothes and were not disguised. Ennis gave the brief to T. M. Healy, who already had concerns—when he was imprisoned in Richmond Jail in early 1883, he had heard an account from the warder, who had been in Kilmainham when the Maamtrasna prisoners were there. He was now converted to the cause.118 On 24 October 1884 Harrington moved an amendment of the queen’s speech on the subject of Maamtrasna. The debate took place over four days. Parnell spoke, and Gladstone was drawn in to defend Spencer. What was most significant was the interventions of Tories such as Randolph Churchill and Edward Clarke criticising the conduct of the cases.119
The controversy over Maamtrasna engulfed Lord Spencer. The state of Irish opinion is illustrated by the bemused account of Sir Charles Dilke, a leading Liberal who visited Ireland in May 1885. On Whit Sunday, Dilke and Spencer, under discreet but heavy police protection, walked by the site of the Phoenix Park murders on to the Strawberry Beds, past thousands of Dubliners. ‘In the course of the whole long walk but one man lifted his hat to Spencer, who was universally recognised, but assailed by the majority of those we met with shouts of “Who killed Myles Joyce?”, while some varied the proceedings by calling “Murderer!” after him. A few days later, when I was driving with Lady Spencer in an open carriage, a well-dressed bicyclist came riding through the cavalry escort, and in a quiet, conversational tone observed to us, “Who killed Myles Joyce?”’120
A year after Dilke’s visit, in a division on the budget in the early hours of 9 June 1885, the Conservatives and the Irish Party brought down Gladstone’s government. T. P. O’Connor described the scene as it became apparent the government had lost:
Lord Randolph Churchill was the leader of the uproar.… The Parnellites, meantime, kept silence, having delivered so many blows that had just stopped short. But when the paper was handed to Mr. Winn, the Parnellites felt secure, and burst into a deep, wild note of triumph. ‘Coercion!’ ‘Buckshot!’ ‘Spencer!’ and in one solitary instance ‘Myles Joyce!’ rose from their thick and excited ranks; their self-controlled leader did not join in the cries, but his pale face was a trifle paler, and there was a happy smile upon it. Throughout all this mad tumult—one of the maddest ever seen in the House of Commons—Mr. Gladstone remained outwardly untroubled, unheeding, even unhearing.121
Sir William Harcourt, the outgoing Liberal home secretary, notable for a candid impatience on all matters that pertained to Ireland, referred to the combining of the Tories and the Irish Party as ‘the Maamtrasna alliance’.122
The new Conservative government of Lord Salisbury decided not to concede Parnell’s demand for an inquiry into Maamtrasna. On 15 July 1885 Parnell moved for an inquiry. The vehemence of the Irish onslaught on Spencer miscarried, and the debate did little more than open a rift between the Irish and the government, so undermining the prospects for the negotiations that Parnell was to conduct with Carnarvon, the Lord Lieutenant.123 The debate was barren of results for the four prisoners. Carnarvon subsequently rejected the memorials of appeal submitted on their behalf. One of the prisoners, Michael Casey, died in Maryborough prison a month after the debate. He was believed to have been guilty. The remaining prisoners were believed innocent by Harrington and others.124 So ended the belated and improbable elevation of Maamtrasna into late Victorian high politics. If something of the trial lingered in the public mind, the releases of the last three Maamtrasna prisoners in the Edwardian Ireland of late October 1902 had the aspect of a historical and topographical curiosity.
The Maamtrasna murders were not political in any meaningful sense of the term. The horror of the slaughter of the household of John Joyce was such that it would inevitably create a public sensation. Its timing months after the Phoenix Park murders ensured that it acquired a political colouration. In a contemporary political imaginaire steeped in ideas of incorrigible Irish criminality, it was perceived as complementary to the assassinations perpetrated by the Invincibles in the Phoenix Park. Nationalist opinion was itself shaken by the Phoenix Park assassinations and the Maamtrasna murders. In their calculated atrociousness, neither was compatible with the nationalist and post-1886 Liberal narrative of a degree of low-level rural crime in Ireland attributable to the underlying injustices of Irish land law. Maamtrasna was in an area of Galway/Mayo that had eluded the control of the Land League. There were rumours that the murders had something to do with a secret society, a survival of ‘Ribbonism’, ‘the name given to the sporadic, ineffective, and usually violent agrarian combinations which had preceded the Land League’.125 In October 1881 Parnell, dining with two Irish members, was asked who was to take his place if he was arrested, and replied, ‘Ah, if I am arrested, Captain Moonlight will take my place’.126 What he meant was that a recrudescence of localised agrarian intimidation and violence would be the result of his arrest and the suppression of the Land League. Parnell later asserted that the Maamtrasna murders involved a secret society dispute.127 His purpose was to reinforce his own narrative on the subject of crime in rural Ireland, and to suggest the existence of a structure of agrarian violence which the Land League had held in check. What prompted the murders was probably what George Bolton claimed when he briefed the press at the time and later asserted. On 3 January 1882 Joseph Huddy and his grandson, who were serving ejectments for the non-payment of rent, were murdered at Clonbrack, County Galway. Their bodies were thrown in weighted sacks into the middle of Lough Mask. According to Bolton, a paragraph in a Dublin paper said that the authorities had been aided in finding the bodies later in the month by an old woman residing on the mountain overlooking Lough Mask who had seen the bodies being thrown in when she was gathering firewood. The perpetrators believed this woman to be Margaret Joyce, the mother of John Joyce, who had shortly before the murders gone to live with her son. Bolton believed this led to her murder and to that of her son, and that the rest of the household were killed to ensure the perpetrators were not identified.128 Bolton’s account has the merit of explaining how the entire Joyce household came to be slaughtered.
Jarlath Waldron, the well-informed and attentive modern chronicler of the murders, has characterised John Joyce as ‘unquestionably the champion sheep-stealer in the Valley’. Big John Casey of Bunachrick was ‘easily the wealthiest man in the Valley’,129 where wealth was measured in sheep. Harrington, in his pamphlet, identified Casey as the ‘supposed leader’ of the attack on the Joyce household,130 and United Ireland repeatedly charged that the murders were carried out at Casey’s instigation.131 What is plain is that the murders took place on a plane that was utterly remote from the contemporary political and had nothing to do with Parnell, with the Land League, with the Fenians, or indeed with the Invincibles.
