In April 2018, President Michael D. Higgins granted a posthumous pardon to Myles Joyce, executed in December 1882 for his alleged role in the brutal murder of a family in the townland of Maamtrasna, County Galway. Joyce was one of eight men found guilty in a dramatic trial that attracted considerable attention across Britain and Ireland. Three of the prisoners were executed while the remainder were sentenced to life in jail after changing their pleas to guilty. The verdicts in the Maamtrasna murders case were immediately controversial. Prominent nationalist politicians and journalists from Timothy Harrington to James Joyce published pointed critiques of the prosecution's case, highlighting contradictions in witness testimonies as well as a number of procedural issues. The issue of translation and the Irish language was particularly problematic. The court failed to provide a translator for Myles Joyce, a monoglot Irish speaker who thus might not have understood the arguments and evidence being used against him. Joyce maintained his innocence until the end and died in a botched execution that only underlined the cruelty and injustice of his treatment. An official pardon was finally granted after a ‘final and authoritative’ review of the case in 2015 by U.C.D.’s Dr Niamh Howlin, who concluded that the trial's many irregularities made the verdict unsafe.

Margaret Kelleher's captivating microhistory of the Maamtrasna murders uses the trial and its aftermath to explore the connections between language, law and violence in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Using a wide array of archival and print sources, Kelleher argues that the Maamtrasna case highlights the complexity of language shift and cultural change in post-Famine Ireland, a point epitomised by the diverse linguistic skills of the accused, who ranged from monoglot Irish speakers to men who were comfortable in Irish and English. The book thus joins a rapidly growing body of work that challenges histories of nineteenth-century Ireland that start from the premise that the Irish language was in inexorable decline. Kelleher's focus on the importance of cultural mediation and translation also allows her to draw important parallels between the Maamtrasna case and the injustice faced by contemporary global migrants and refugees who find themselves on trial in legal systems that often fail to provide adequate translation services.

The Maamtrasna murders is quite simply a joy to read. Crime stories often make for absorbing narratives, but it is the depth of research and the author's keen eye for evocative detail that stand out here. Alongside Breandán Mac Suibhne's recent The end of outrage, this book makes an excellent case for the value of good microhistory, featuring detailed descriptions of complex social and power relationships that provide essential context for Kelleher's layered narrative. She carefully points to the ubiquitous presence of the Irish language in a supposedly bilingual courtroom, thus highlighting the myriad difficulties faced by a generation of men and women forced to adopt a new language. The author's close and sympathetic description of Myles Joyce's last words and brutal execution is particularly riveting. Joyce went to the gallows repeatedly insisting (in Irish) that he was innocent, a struggle that culminated in a botched execution. The coroner's jury blamed the infamous English executioner, William Marwood, grimly reporting that while the other two victims ‘died from fractures of the neck, the result of hanging, Myles Joyce died from strangulation’.

Joyce's gruesome end quickly became the focus for public controversy. Much of the book focuses on the trial's aftermath, detailing both the lived experiences of the surviving prisoners and the political and cultural reverberations of the Maamtrasna case. It is this combination of rich social history and clear-eyed cultural critique that makes the book so compelling. Charting the case's rich afterlife, Kelleher provides close analyses of Tim Harrington's The Maamtrasna massacre: impeachment at the trials (Dublin, 1884) and James Joyce's 1908 essay ‘Ireland at the bar’, texts that highlight the nexus of British injustice and the Irish language (albeit in very different ways) at the heart of this tragedy. She argues that by ignoring the interplay between Irish and English in the Maamtrasna murders, historians and literary scholars alike have effectively silenced figures like Myles Joyce, denying them the right to be heard in their own language. The book closes with a powerful discussion of the ways that immigrants now find themselves in monolingual legal systems, fateful encounters that echo the cultural exclusion and injustice at the heart of the case. It is a fitting conclusion to an excellent book, a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Ireland or the history of language and culture.