1882 was a year for vicious murders in Ireland. Aristocrats and peasants alike fell victim to the ongoing Land War. But nothing that year compared to the callous murders of five members of the Joyce family of Maamtrasna on the Mayo-Galway border. Nothing, perhaps, except the famously unjust treatment meted out to four of their cousins accused of involvement in the murders. In The Maamtrasna Murders Professor Margaret Kelleher offers a “powerful and meticulous new history of the murders and their aftermaths” (Irish Times) and exorcises the ghost of the tragic Maolra Seoighe (Myles Joyce).
