In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well.
Land Is All that Matters tells the sweeping story of the agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland.
Two episodes from the 1880s: First the conviction and sentencing of an innocent victim of the 1879-82 Land War, Maolra Seoighe/Myles Joyce (posthumously pardoned by President Higgins in 2018). Then the notorious evictions in Bodyke, Co. Clare in 1887.
17 November 1882, Green Street Courthouse, Dublin
Maolra Seoighe sat impassively throughout his trial. This had less to do with his personal conviction that, since he was innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, the jury would naturally find him 'not guilty', than with the fact that he spoke almost no English.
His court-appointed interpreter, an Irish-speaking RIC constable named Evans, was providing him with a sketchy account of proceedings. The accused man had very little sense of what was going on around him. He knew the jury was considering his case. He did not need to speak English to be aware of that. When they returned after six minutes to deliver their verdict, he must have felt optimistic. It hadn’t taken them long to see through the lies of the prosecution witnesses and acknowledge his innocence. He had taken no part in the brutal murders of his five Joyce cousins in Maamtrasna. He had been tucked up in bed when the Joyces were shot (the males) or bludgeoned to death (the females), for who knew what reason. Seoighe watched, uncomprehendingly, as the foreman of the jury delivered the verdict. When Evans turned to him, ashen-faced, and told him in Irish that he had been found guilty of murder, the prisoner almost fainted. He clutched the railing of the dock to support himself. Looking towards the heavens, for God himself to witness his truth, he began to speak as Gaeilge.
The Freeman’s Journal court reporter recorded what happened next:
… looking upwards with a fervent expression and attitude of invocation, [he] spoke in Irish. The interpreter rendered it as follows – ‘He leaves it to God and the virgin above his head. He had no dealing with it, no more than the person who was never born, nor had he against anyone else. For the last twenty years he had done no harm, and if he had, might he never go to heaven. He was as clear of this as the child yet to be born.
Before Maolra Seoighe (Myles Joyce) was hanged in Galway jail, the two men destined to die with him, Patrick Joyce and Patrick Casey, admitted their involvement in the horrific crime at Maamtrasna and exonerated Seoighe. He had not been a member of the seven-man gang who slaughtered the Joyces in their tiny cabin. The Lord Lieutenant, Earl Spencer, now had the power of life or death over a seemingly innocent man. He could, on the basis of this convincing new evidence, quash the sentence of Myles Joyce. Instead, he ordered the execution to proceed.
Maolra Seoighe, according to those who witnessed his execution, died an appalling death. To the last he continued to loudly declare his innocence. He might have saved his breath. The executioner, William Marwood, had no sympathy, and no Irish. Neither did he perform his duties in an exemplary manner:
The rope caught in the wretched man’s arm, and for some seconds it was seen being jerked and tugged in the writhing of his last agony. The grim hangman cast an angry glance into the pit, and then, hissing an obscene oath at the struggling victim, sat on the beam, and kicked him into eternity.
A succession of Irish informers, approvers, false witnesses and corrupt lawyers conspired to end Myles Joyce’s life. The crime of which he was accused was of a piece with the petty jealousies, feuds, infighting and callous perjury that led to his fatal appointment with executioner William Marwood.
Joyce was as much a victim of the gruesome ‘tenant-on-tenant’ violence of the 1880s as any of the farmers, herders or labourers murdered by their neighbours.
Bodyke, Co. Clare, 27 May 1887
The old lady poses defiantly in the window of the whitewashed thatched cottage. A dozen supporters, including two priests, also stare into the camera. The older of the two clerics is seated and sports an elegant top hat. Standing beside him is a grizzled old man in threadbare clothes wearing a ‘topper’ that has seen better decades. The entrance to the cottage and the two windows not occupied by the determined eighty-year-old widow, Margaret McNamara, have been blockaded with the heavy trunks of recently felled trees. Everything is in readiness for the approach of the 450-strong force of constabulary and soldiers, which will be heavily outnumbered when the tolling of chapel bells and the blowing of horns summons a hostile crowd numbering close to 5,000. When the time comes for the police and military to dislodge the defiant widow, her three sons and two daughters from their home and their nineteen-acre holding, the McNamaras will not lack for support.
The setting for this ominous tableau was a ‘pleasant little village with a score or two of houses and half a dozen shops’. Bodyke in Co. Clare was almost impossible to find on any map. It was also small enough to lack a resident priest. The inhabitants were obliged to attend mass in nearby Toomgraney, in the other half of the parish. But, as the visiting Pall Mall Gazette correspondent Henry Norman wryly commented, ‘it is blessed with a police barracks’. The presence of the paramilitary gendarmerie in such an apparently insignificant hamlet was entirely necessary, according to the newly appointed divisional magistrate, Colonel Alfred E. Turner. Turner had seen service in India twice and had survived the Gordon debacle in the Sudan, so he was not easily intimidated. But even such a grizzled warrior was uneasy about this apparently inconsequential village, whose ‘evil reputation’ had spread beyond Co. Clare. Henry Norman was told by a Limerick jarvey that it was more than his livelihood was worth to convey him to Bodyke ‘if you’re anything to do with the sheriff ’. This turbulent recent past was now mere prologue. Norman, a plethora of fellow journalists, Michael Davitt, the Quaker philanthropist James Hack Tuke, five Home Rule MPs and upwards of a dozen priests were not present in Co. Clare merely to enjoy the spectacle of Bodyke’s abundant local ‘blossom’d furze, unprofitably gay’. They were there because of the presence of two magistrates (Colonels Turner and Miller), the county sub-sheriff James McMahon, 300 members of the RIC and 150 members of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers – imported from Fermoy barracks – all of whom were about the business of the local landlord, Colonel John O’Callaghan. A spectacle was in store that would be either affectingly poignant or unnervingly violent – or both. There were rumours that at least one of the houses to be targeted by the bailiffs had been mined.
The Bodyke evictions were about to begin.
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