"The law must take its course."

From the rear of the courthouse on all of the first floor rooms, the views from the windows would be of the impressive looking cathedral just the other side of the bridge that spans the river Corrib and joins them both. This cathedral replaced an old prison that closed for good in 1939 that ended a chapter in history that most people back then would have preferred to forget. For the rest of us it should not never be forgotten. It was a pitiless building from a pitiless time where the grim and unjust sentences and miscarriages of justice of the Galway courthouse rendered many a man and woman to die there slowly from a living hell. Others were dispatched more quickly where their innocence was just a moot point afterwards. 

                                                          Myles Joyce

One of them was a man named Myles Joyce who was to be hanged in 1882 along with two more innocent men because they had been implicated falsely in the Connemara Maamtrasna murders. The family that were slaughtered there that fateful night were a man, his mother and his wife  including their daughter and son. Another nine -year old son was badly injured but survived and his older brother was lucky to have been away that night. Because of the murders, these two newly orphaned boys ended up later in a children's prison: the Artane Industrial reformatory Institution in Dublin.

The heavily pregnant wife of Myles Joyce wrote in part of her appeal for clemency to try and save her husband from the hangman: "I earnestly beg and implore his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant to examine and consider this hard case of an innocent man, which leaves a widow and five orphans to be before a long drift in the world." The response from his Excellency was as cold as the cell that held Myles: "The law must take its course."

The last words spoken by Myles in his only language that was Irish just before the noose was tied around his neck were: "I am going before my God. I was not there at all. I had no hand or part in it. I am as innocent as a child in a cradle. It is a poor thing to take this life away on a stage; but I have my priest with me." Then he stepped onto a platform where the floor dropped beneath him. His life was extinguished slowly and very painfully  for he was not hung but strangled to death because the hangman had not set the stage properly.     

Two years later, one of the three false witnesses against Myles Joyce admitted that he lied in his testimony in a type of public confession to all that attended his local church one morning; but that was long after this liar and the other two with him had been paid the staggering sum of £1,250 between them which is equivalent to around £157,000 (sterling) or over $200,000 American dollars today. An amount simply unheard of before or since for witnesses in Galway or much anywhere else. The man who paid them their blood money was the same Lord Lieutenant. A journalist who wrote about the case in 1885 said: "The British government couldn't contemplate the appalling vista of having to admit to convicting innocent people." There has never been an official apology since.

The now famous cathedral that stands on that site today of the infamous prison is the focal point for locals and tourists alike. Even anyone with no particular religious point of view would be impressed by the external and internal stonework, the reliquaries, the beautiful mosaics and other artwork within; not to mention the feeling of peaceful solitude and community spirit that it all seems to bring. There every Sunday, the main players or priests with a bishop now and again for guest appearance, wear their costumes well for church services that includes weddings, births and deaths for most other weeks of every year. In many ways this building represents the draping over of past injustices for it would be a fitting memorial to all those that died and were buried here if even a plague served as their obituary. But there is none, as it is often an Irish custom to cover up by covering over the wrongs of the past and the present in the hope that they won't be found out in the future.

Back at the court house on that same first floor room, yet another group of actors huddle around tables making deals in secret union with one another. Many of these men and women also wear costume wigs and gowns befitting to their roles; portraying themselves to the public galleries in the building and to their clients, as legal combatants with morals. They call themselves lawyers or solicitors and barristers at law. At any day's end in this trinity of buildings, it is about how well each performances will go down by the actors, and how it was believed by those that it mattered to. Shakespeare wrote: "The worlds a stage and all the men merely players. They have their exits and their entrances..." Oscar Wilde added his spin on it by saying "The world is a stage and the play is badly cast." This Galway courthouse with it's courtroom and stages, badly cast or not, would become a familiar arena for Vincent Coyne. He also happened to hail from the same area as Myles Joyce in Connemara, while his grandmother, who's maiden name was also Joyce, was related to him. Let the play begin......

Barry Clifford 

An excerpt from my forthcoming book: Law, Lawyers and Liars