Joyce

The Joyces took up substantial territory in the rugged country of Iar Connacht — the western mountains and lakes of north Connemara — which became known as Joyce Country (Dúiche Sheoighe), a name still in use for the parishes of Cong and the upper Lough Corrib. They were known for unusual physical stature in the Gaelic record; one Joyce of the 14th century was reputedly seven feet tall.

James Joyce (1882–1941), the Dublin-born novelist of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), is the most internationally famous bearer of the surname. His direct paternal line is from a Cork branch of the Joyce family — his grandfather John Joyce moved from Cork to Dublin in the 1850s — and James himself made repeated reference in interviews and letters to the family's Galway origin and to Joyce Country specifically.

Myles Joyce (c.1842–1882), a Connemara Joyce, was hanged at Galway Gaol on 15 December 1882 for the Maamtrasna murders — convicted on the testimony of accomplices in a trial conducted entirely in English, which Myles, who spoke only Irish, did not understand. The trial became a cause célèbre of late-Victorian Britain; James Joyce wrote about it as a young man for the Trieste paper Il Piccolo della Sera. Myles Joyce was formally exonerated and given a posthumous presidential pardon by Michael D. Higgins in 2018.