The story of the Maamtrasna murders is a fictionalized account of actual events. Both “fictionalized” and “actual” are important words. The events in the story actually happened in the West of Ireland in 1882. A family of five were brutally murdered and a sixth member barely survived. Informers, for their own purposes, lied about who the killers were. Five of the ten men arrested were not involved in the crime in any way. Nonetheless, in as corrupt a violation of justice as one can imagine, one of these men died and four served long jail sentences. Dublin Castle, the seat of English misrule in Ireland, covered up its mistakes. An attempt by Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament to reopen the case failed, as it was doomed to. The innocent man who was executed, Myles Joyce, is one of the great Irish folk heroes of the nineteenth century. One reflects, as does the narrator of my story, that the trial was not unlike that of blacks in the South at that time or Native Americans in the West. Nor are such travesties of justice, especially the immunizing of witnesses, absent from the tactics of American prosecutors today. Father Jarlath Waldron’s wonderful book about the incident (Maamtrasna: The Murders and the Mystery. 1992. Dublin : Edmund Burke) provides a detailed historical account of the Maamtrasna story. When I picked up a copy of the book in Kenny’s Bookstore in Galway, I realized that the story would make a wonderful novel.
History and historical fiction are necessarily not the same thing. The purpose of history is to narrate events as accurately as one can. The purpose of historical fiction is to enable a reader through the perspective of the characters in the story to feel that she or he is present at the
events. Such a goal obviously requires some modification of the events. Thus the fictional characters in this novel are Edward H. Fitzpatrick, Nora Joyce, Thomas Finnucane, Martin Dempsey, and Josephine “Josie” Philbin. Moreover because of the constraints of the Nuala Anne series, I have moved the story from the region west of Lough Mask in the current County Mayo (though it was in Galway at the time) to the County Galway of the present and from the Archdiocese of Tuam to the Diocese of Galway. Because of this change I have had to reconstruct somewhat the geography of the story. Bishop John Kane is also fictional. The exchange between him and the Earl Spencer was in fact between Archbishop MacEvilly of Tuam and Spencer (an ancestor of the late Princess Diana). For narrative purposes I have compressed the time of events in the years after the execution.
I have also tried to simplify the problem of the names of the people involved. The area in the region is quite properly called Joyce Country. Many families share the same name. The victims, the informers, and some of the killers were all Joyces.
Thus the reader of this novel can believe that the main historical events actually happened. The reader must also realize that many of the historical details have been changed to fit the needs of novel writing. For precision of detail the reader must turn to Father Waldron’s book.
I share Father Waldron’s fury at this story of corruption and injustice. However, out of respect for his work, I have taken only one sentence from his book. On page 108 he writes, “The next man called into the dock was destined to become a folk hero whose name would never die.”
Amen to that.
I’m also grateful to my colleague and friend Micheal McGreil S. J. (whom Nuala Anne claims as a cousin!) for his input on Maamtrasna and for the story of the 1982 cross that he attempted to place at the Joyce house.
In the story I follow Father Waldron’s custom of using the English version of the names. However John Joyce and John Casey were surely know as Sean Joyce and Sean Casey in their own times and Myles Joyce’s Irish name was surely Molua.
Grand Beach, Chicago,
Autumn 1999