Maolra Seoighe

Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce) was an Irish man who was wrongfully convicted and hanged on 15 December 1882. He was found guilty of the Maamtrasna Murders and was sentenced to death. Though Seoighe could only speak Irish, the case was heard in English without any translation service. He was posthumously pardoned in 2018.

Maamtrasna murders 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 (John Joyce, his wife Brighid, his mother Mairéad, his daughter Peigí and son Mícheál) 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

The court proceedings were carried out in a language the accused did not understand (English), with a solicitor from Trinity College Dublin, who did not speak Irish.

Timothy Harrington, then MP for Westmeath, took up the case, claiming that the Crown Prosecutor for the case George Bolton, had deliberately withheld evidence from the trial. In 2011, two sitting members of the House of Lords, the Liberal Democrat life peers David Alton and Eric Lubbock, requested a review of the case. Crispin Blunt, Tory Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, stated that Seoighe 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 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. A dramatised Irish-language film regarding the affair, entitled Murdair Mhám Trasna, produced by Ciarán Ó Cofaigh was released in 2017.