Tag Archives: County Galway

Language, Law, and the Maamtrasna Murders

Myles Joyce declared he was innocent of the August 1882 murders of five neighbors in rural Maamtrasna, County Galway. “I had no dealing with it, no more than the person who was never born,” he said.

Joyce, in his 40s, spoke Irish. The crown prosecutors and judge in the Dublin courtroom where he was tried for the crime spoke English. Joyce was denied a translator until he was found guilty and sentenced. He was hanged in December 1882.

Margaret Kelleher at Georgetown.

Margaret Kelleher, chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, authored the 2018 book about the case, The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life, and Death in Nineteenth-Century. In a Feb. 19 talk at Georgetown University’s Global Irish Studies program, she acknowledged becoming aware of her own tendency to say Joyce spoke “only Irish”, instead of “Irish only,” a vestige of how the language was diminish by the official English of the ruling British state. Joyce was among just over 64,000 monoglot Irish speakers in a population of 5.1 million.

In April 2018, Irish President Michael D. Higgins granted a posthumous pardon to Joyce, concluding “the case was unsafe according the standards of the time.” Debate continues as to whether the British state that administering the 19th century court system that failed Joyce should take the same action. The bigger question, however, is whether such miscarriages of justice can be avoided today.

Kelleher reprised these thoughts from her 2018 piece in The Irish Times:

In contemporary Ireland, the arrival of new immigrants from a more diverse range of backgrounds than heretofore necessitates a significant expansion of translation and interpretation services in the judicial system; yet these needs are poorly addressed, where recognized, at service or policy level. … Our contemporary moment is one in which large-scale mobility (forced or voluntary) is occurring within a seemingly globalized society but individual migrants can find poor accommodation from judicial systems and legal processes.

I look forward to reading the book, now being published in North America by University of Chicago Press Books.

From Marconi to Twitter in 100 years

My only obstacle to calling Ireland is coordinating the time difference. From my iPhone, I reach out to family and friends from home, office, or while traveling. The device’s digital connection also allows me to text and Tweet, and read The Irish Times as easily as The Washington Post.

Communications were not always so instant, as just remembered at the north Kerry seaside town of Ballybunion. There, on the eastern edge of the Atlantic, on March 19, 1919, an engineer working for Guglielmo Marconi  transmitted the first spoken words across the ocean to Nova Scotia.

“Hello Canada, hello Canada.”

Ballybunion “pulled out all the stops” for the recent centenary, the Ballybunion News boasted, including a visit by Marconi’s 89-year-old daughter, Princess Elettra Marconi Giovanelli, who recreated the famous greeting. The Kerryman reported:

Sadly, the original wooden wireless station hasn’t been around since the Civil War era, but the Irish College made for a perfect replacement as all decamped there for the repeat broadcast. It was successfully picked up at a station close to the original receiver in Nova Scotia in a communication that gave many present a thrilling sense of the history – not least the numerous amateur and professional radio operators from across the county and region gathered.

Three months after the original transmission from Ballybunion, British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, to Clifden in County Galway, about 100 miles north of Ballybunion. Their trip in an open cockpit took just under 16 hours.

Today, I fly from Washington, D.C. to Dublin in less than seven hours. Even as airline seating has become more cramped, the safety and amenities of commercial aviation is taken for granted.

A century ago, communications and travel each entered a new age.

Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited: Two nicknames

This blog serial explored aspects of the 1888 book Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American, by journalist William Henry Hurlbert. Previous posts and other background material are available at the project landing page. #IUCRevisited

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“I found a good car at the railway station, and set off at once for Portumna.”
–William Henry Hurlbert

In late February 1888, Hurlbert traveled from Cork city to Portumna in western County Galway, in the Irish Midlands. He stopped in Parsonstown, noting its ancient (and present) Irish name of Birr, from St. Brendan’s Abbey of Biorra. The American reporter described the town as “a clean prosperous place, carefully looked after by the chief landlord of the region, the Earl of Rosse,” a peerage of the Parsons family, and thus the town’s name in the 19th century.

This historic limestone boulder in Birr is referred to as the ‘Navel of Ireland’ and is often considered to mark the center of Ireland.

Hurlbert also mentioned that Sir William Petty called the place Umbilicus Hiberniae, or the “Navel of Ireland,” in his 1650s Survey of Ireland, since it was believed to be the center of Ireland. Other references to this nickname date to the 12th century.

The true geographic center of Ireland is actually 35 miles to the north, in Carnagh East townland, County Roscommon, near Altlone. The town straddles the River Shannon and also includes portion of County Westmeath.

***

Hurlbert made his way to Portmuna Castle on the estate of the Marquis of Clanricarde, where he was the guest of land agent Edward Shaw Tener. As they discussed the agrarian agitation in Ireland, Tener stated that he knew the agent’s job came with personal risk. Hurlbert then referenced an earlier passage of his book:

But he [Tener] takes this part of the contract very coolly, telling me that the only real danger, he thinks, is incurred when he makes a journey of which he has to send a notice by telegraph–a remark which recalled to me the curious advice given me in Dublin to seal my letters, as protection against ‘ the Nationalist clerks in the post offices.’ “

Portumna Castle

Tener said that his precautions were required “not at all against the tenants  … nor the people here at Portumna, but from mischievous and dangerous persons at Loughrea and Woodford,” outside the estate. “Woodford … got the name of the ‘cockpit of Ireland‘, because it was there that Mr. [John] Dillon, in October 1886, opened the ‘war against the landlords’ with the ‘Plan of Campaign’.”

NOTES: From pages 249 to 257, of Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. 

NEXT: Battling books

Copyright 2018 by Mark Holan

Ringling Circus closing: the Irish connection

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “The Greatest Show on Earth,” is closing in May after 146 years of performances. High costs and dwindling attendance following an earlier decision to remove elephants from the show were cited as reasons. A 19th century form of entertainment couldn’t survive 21st century audiences.

Brothers John Ringling North and Henry Ringling North, heirs to the five founding Ringling brothers, sold the circus in 1967 to the current owners, ending more than 80 years of Ringling family control. The brothers became Irish citizens in the early 1960s, shortly after Henry purchased Northbrook, their father’s ancestral home, at Kilconnell, County Galway.

A collection of 1,200 books belonging to Henry was bequeathed to the James Hardiman Library at NUI Galway in 2014.

An elephant wears a St. Patricks Day hat during the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus Pachyderm Parade in Washington on March 17, 2009. (UPI Photo/Kevin Dietsch)