Maolra Seoighe was the most prominent figure in a controversial trial in 1882 that took place while Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. Three Irish language speakers were condemned to death for the murder of a local family in Maamtrasna, on the border between County Mayo and County Galway. It was presumed by the authorities to be a local feud connected to sheep rustling and the Land War. Eight men were convicted on what turned out to be perjured evidence and three of them condemned to death: Myles Joyce, Pat Casey and Pat Joyce. The court proceedings were carried out in a language they did not understand, with a solicitor from Trinity College, Dublin, who did not speak Irish. The three were executed in Galway by William Marwood for the crime in 1882. The role of John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, who was then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, is the most controversial aspect of the trial, leading most modern scholars to count it as a miscarriage of justice; research carried out in the British archives by Seán Ó Cuirreáin, has found that Spencer "compensated" three alleged eyewitnesses to the sum of £1,250, equivalent to €157,000. To date, the Spencer family and the British government have issued no apology or pardon for the executions, though the case has been periodically taken up by various political figures. The then MP for Westmeath, Timothy Harrington, took up the case, claiming that the Crown Prosecutor for the case George Bolton, had deliberately withheld evidence from the trial. In 2011, the two sitting members of the British House of Lords, David Alton and Eric Lubbock from the Liberal Democrats, requested a review of the case. Crispin Blunt, Tory Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, stated that Joyce was "probably an innocent man", but that he would not be seeking an official pardon. On 4 April 2018 Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, issued a pardon on the advice of the current government of Ireland saying “Maolra Seoighe was wrongly convicted of murder and was hanged for a crime that he did not commit.” It is the first presidential pardon relating to an event predating the foundation of the state in 1922 and the second time a pardon has been issued after an execution. The case of Myles Joyce is not an isolated one, and there are strong similarities with the case of Patrick Walsh who was hanged in Galway jail on 22 September 1882 just three months before Maolra for the murders of Martin and John Lydon. The same key players and political factors were active in both cases and his conviction is just as questionable as that of Myles
Media
In September 2009, the story featured on RTÉ's CSI programme under an episode entitled CSI Maamtrasna Massacre. A dramatised Irish-language film regarding the affair, entitled Murdair Mhám Trasna, produced by Ciarán Ó Cofaigh was released in 2017.
