Bullets and Rosary Beads

At 2:54, AMA Fireball rips through the Grand Brighton, bringing death and destruction, causing anarchy and panic. The ceilings collapse, the floor covered in shattered glass. The screams of the wounded, the terror of those still alive, the desperate attempts to find the injured and the maimed. Emergency services rushed to the scene to try and help those who can still be saved. It was the 12th of October 1984 in Brighton, a seaside town on the South Coast of England where the Conservative Party was holding it's annual conference and the main event of the conference was to be a speech by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

This attack had been a direct blow at the heart of the British state, struck by the Irish Republican Army. It was one of the most audacious attacks in the history of the sad and bitter tale that would be the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Five people were killed, dozens more were wounded, maimed and crippled, but Margaret Thatcher was alive. She had been working late until the early hours of the morning. The bathroom that she had just walked out when the fireball tore through the Grand Brighton was absolutely destroyed. If she had been there for just a few more minutes, she would have been killed.

But she survived, and so did her determination to crush the IRA. The IRA released a statement today. We were unlucky. But remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. In the days after, detectives poured over the rubble, looking for any clue that might give them something that could lead them to those responsible. And they found one very small, very telling and very interesting piece of evidence, the shattered remains of a memo parking timer, a kind of timer that's used by motorists on continental Europe to tell them how long they have on their parking meter. And this was something that was turning up in the remains of more and more IRA bombs.

You see, the bomb that was meant to kill Margaret Thatcher had been planted months before on a long term delayed fuse to go off exactly within the early hours of the morning of the Conservative Party conference to give the maximum chance of killing her. This was an operation of tremendous audacity and sophistication and it had only been made possible by the IR as ability to acquire these memo parking timers. This was the handiwork of a man who is incredibly important to the IR as ability to wage its campaign of torture, murder, rape and terror against the people of Northern Ireland. A man called Father Patrick Ryan, a priest from Tipperary, or as he was known within the IRA, the Padre. Welcome to Ancient Recent, My name is Joseph Parkinson and this week we will be looking at the story of Father Patrick Ryan, the IRA priest who funneled guns and money to the Irish Republican Army in the waging of a campaign of terror against the British state and against the people of Northern Ireland.

This episode of Ancient Recent is brought to you by the World of Whiskey, the number one place for whiskey cask investment. To find out more about the world of whiskey, visit worldofwhiskey.co.uk. You can find a link on my bio to take you to their website where you can explore fantastic opportunities for whiskey cask investment. This is not financial advice. All investment comes with risk. Please remember to drink responsibly and invest responsibly. The 1980s was a period of truly grim horror in the dark comedy that was the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Atrocities were committed both by the IRA, other republican organizations like the INLA, also by Loyalists, pro British paramilitary organizations like the UVF, the UDA. Innocent civilians were killed by the British armed forces. It was a terrible, brutal, dirty war. The British government had signed the Anglo Irish Treaty in the hope of improving relations and improving security cooperation with the government of the Irish Republic. However, there was a constant rising of tensions between the British and Irish governments.

The British always perceived the Irish government as simply not going far enough in helping stop the IRA and constantly putting pressure in the Irish government and saying to the Irish government, look, people are being killed here, innocent people are being killed, children are being killed here and you could do more. But at the same time the Irish government was reluctant to fully commit to help because there was a very real awareness that the IRA had some considerable sympathy in the South of Ireland.

It was believed if the Irish government was to agree to fully commit to helping the British government with the extradition of IRA suspects that that could lead to social unrest in the South of Ireland. It could lead to full blown civil war. Ireland had experienced civil war between the government in Dublin and hardcore Republicans in the 1920s, and he'd left a legacy of tremendous bitterness. Was Ireland really going to go through that again?

But the drum beat of IRA atrocities, the killings, the shootings, the disappearances went on. The drip, drip, drip of blood and tears continued on the 8th of November 1987, on the eve of Remembrance Sunday, one of the most sacred days in the calendar of British national identity, when the nation gathers to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in both World Wars. The IRA planted a bomb in in the skillin at a church service being held at the Cenotaph, the War Memorial.

The bomb killed 11 people, 11 human beings who had just gathered to remember the dead. They weren't soldiers, they weren't police officers, they weren't in any way connected with the British state. They were just normal human beings who were paying their respects to those who had given their lives in the defence of democracy. 11 people were killed. There was Wesley in Bertha Armstrong 62 and 65, Kit and Jesse Johnson 71 and 62, William and Agnes Mullen 7473, John Mcgaw 67, Albert Quinton 72, Samuel Galt 49, Edward Armstrong 52 and Marie Wilson 20.

After the Inniskillin bombing Charles Hohey, who was the tea shirk or Prime Minister of Ireland, agreed to Co operate with the British government on extradition. However, there was still considerable domestic pressure to not be seen to be agreeing too much to British demands and so he inserted a clause into the agreement that said that every application for extradition would have to be reviewed first by the Irish Attorney General. This outraged the British government who again perceived the Irish government as not Co operating in the saving of the lives of innocent people and in valuing the rights of terrorists and killers over the rights of innocent people to not be murdered.

And there was one particular person that this case applied to most and it was the previously mentioned Patrick, Father Patrick Ryan. Patrick Ryan at the time had been arrested in Brussels for his involvement in the murder of three off duty British soldiers, Ian Shinner, 20 years old, Miller Reed, 22 and John Baxter, 21. All of them were unarmed at the time the IRA murdered them. Ryan had been arrested by the Belgian government but the Belgians had refused to cooperate with the British and extradite Ryan back to the UK and instead have been extracted back to Ireland, with the Belgians making a point of the flight avoiding British airspace.

Understandably, British security services wanted to get their hands on such a important member of the IRAS operation, but still the Irish government dragged their heels. Which caused a major diplomatic row yet again between Ireland and Britain. Where the Irish would insist that as Ryan hadn't committed a crime in Ireland, they couldn't begin the extradition proceedings until he had arrived and they had had the opportunity to go through a thorough investigation. And the British insisting that Ryan, who was involved not just in the procuring of memo timers, but also had links with the government of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and was a key part in the funneling of funds from Gaddafi to the IRA used to purchase weapons, explosives that were killing British soldiers and killing innocent British people.

Plus on top of that were killing Irish Catholics, were killing innocent people in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike. How had this man ended up being a key player in the IR as campaign of murder and rape and torture in the IR as campaign to force Northern Ireland to become part of the Irish Republic and to kill anyone who got in the way, regardless of the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland? How had a man who had sworn to follow the example of Jesus Christ, how had a man who had forsaken all earthly pleasures of marriage, family, wealth in service to other people, found himself part of an organization as it waged a campaign that turned women into widows and children into orphans?

To understand this, we have to go deep into the history of Ireland and deep into the life of Father Patrick Ryan and his upbringing in rural Ireland. Patrick Ryan was born in 1930 and he was raised steeped in the mythology of Irish republicanism. Ireland had been under some form of British or English rule since the normal conquest of the 12th century, but by the late 19th early 20th century the move towards some sort of home rule had become almost unstoppable.

In 1916, during the height of the First World War, there was an uprising in Dublin called the Easter Rising that led to the proclamation of the Irish Republic which was brutally put down by the British authorities. Between 1919 and 1921 there was the Irish War of Independence and the Irish police force at the time which was called the Ric, the Royal Irish Constabulary, which was won by the British. It was suffering from a severe manpower shortage, So what the Ric did was it recruited large numbers of unemployed ex soldiers back from the trenches of the First World War to be auxiliary police officers to serve in Ireland.

Many of these soldiers had been terribly brutalized by their experiences of fighting in the First World War and they did not make particularly good candidates for community policing. There was a lack of proper uniforms for these soldiers so they ended up wearing a mixed black and brown uniform that gave them the nickname the Black and Tans and they had a reputation for severe violence and brutality. Patrick Ryan's mother, Mary Anne had been involved in the Irish War of Independence where she had kept watch for IRA units for the coming of the Black and Tans. But on the 11th of July 1921 there was a truce announced between the Irish and the British government that led to the negotiation of the Anglo Irish Treaty on the 6th of December.

The partitioning of Ireland into 26 counties that would become the Irish Free State that eventually became the Irish Republic and then in the north, the six counties that became the modern state of Northern Ireland. This treaty was not welcomed universally in the South of Ireland. Some people felt that it was good enough as a stopgap to end the killing and let's just focus now on making this new Irish Free State that could be run largely without the interference of the government in London.

Just make this work. Other people thought that this was a crucial missed opportunity, that once the partition of Ireland set in, it would become permanent and there would be no way of undoing it and so therefore they had to go all the way to the end, otherwise they would never achieve their full objective of a united independent republican island. So this leads to the outbreak of the Irish Civil War between pro and anti treaty forces.

Patrick Ryan's family are on the anti treaty side of this conflict. However, much like the Irish War of Independence is a stalemate with atrocities going back and forth and no one particularly getting the upper hand but the bodies are piling up. The story is very much the same with the Irish Civil War. Many people are killed, there's a huge amount of bloodshed and bitterness, but there doesn't actually seem to be any progress towards a conclusive victory for either side. Eventually the IRA agrees to a ceasefire on the 30th of April 1923, which brings the conflict to an inconclusive end. The treaty cannot be undone, but there's a sort of simmering tension within Irish society.

Patrick Ryan is brought up in Ireland very shortly after these crucial events of the Easter Rising, the Civil War, the War of Independence, and he's brought up in an island that mixes anti British Irish nationalism in the mythology of Irish republicanism. Of this, hundreds and hundreds of years of struggle against British rule with also entwined a deep sense of Catholic identity. And Patrick Ryan's mother makes sure to instill her Catholic faith into her son. The rituals of Catholicism, not eating meat on Fridays, fasting before going to Mass, Mass on Sunday, seeing the rosary are bred into Patrick Ryan and his siblings in the period post independence.

The Catholic Church is the dominant cultural, moral and social institution in the Irish Free State, and it is a long history of British persecution that bound nationalism with Catholicism. In contrast to British rule and Protestantism in 1695, the parliament in Westminster, which at the time governed Ireland. Ireland wasn't fully part of the United Kingdom until 1801, but the Irish parliament was largely directed by. The parliament in Westminster, if not necessarily officially controlled, passes the penal laws, which discriminate against Catholics in education, employment and representation. The parliament in Dublin at the time is effectively A Protestant parliament, even though Protestants are a relatively small percentage of the population of Ireland, or about 1/4 of the population of Ireland at the time. By 1728 there are no Catholics in all of Ireland that have the right to vote.

In 1697 the Catholic clergy are expelled from Ireland. But it has to also be said that when not all of these laws are necessarily enforced to their fullest, it tends to just be in periods of heightened tension and then when things simmer down a little bit there tends to be a loosening of the screws. However, the legislation that discriminates against Catholics keeps coming. In 17 O3 the Potpourri Act is passed that requires Catholic land owners to distribute their land evenly between their sons rather than passing it down to the eldest son. This is aimed at breaking the power of the Catholic landed Gentry.

This leads many people to start to emigrate from Ireland because the laws that are being enacted in Ireland are not being done so to help alleviate the suffering of the Irish people but rather to keep them in their place. Now it must be said that all the while, much of this is being done as the government in Westminster is not particularly paying attention to the internal politics of Ireland. The parliament in Dublin runs Ireland's domestic affairs, and it is much harsher on Irish Catholics than the Parliament in London is.

The Parliament in London basically just wants. Island to stay quiet and to provide money when the government in London needs it, whereas the Parliament in Dublin is a Protestant parliament dominated by the Protestant aristocracy that actively fears Roman Catholics. In the late 18th century there is the United Irishman Rebellion and this is one of a series of rebellions that have gone on over the previous centuries. Terrible violence occurs, there are massacres, both Protestants and Catholics.

It is at this point that the British government decides to enact the Act of Union. Now the reason behind the Act of Union is that if power is taken away from the government in Dublin, which is dominated as the government in London believes, by the petty grievances and interests of Protestant land owners who backed vindictively towards Roman Catholics, and instead Ireland is integrated more fully into Great Britain, then a more enlightened British rule can reign over Ireland that maybe won't be so harsh on the Roman Catholics and maybe there won't be so many rebellions because government will be of a more benign nature.

That's the idea. And to sweeten this pill, the British government proposes the idea of Catholic emancipation. We're going to repeal a lot of the laws that discriminate against Irish Catholics. We're going to let Catholics join the civil service, go into higher education, join the armed forces. We're going to let them sit in Parliament. However, this is then proposed to the king at the time, which is George the Third.

And George the Third takes his vow to be the protector of the Protestant ascendancy very, very seriously. And so he vetoes this legislation, even though many Catholics had been quite keen on the idea of full unification of Britain and Ireland for exactly the reason that they thought that it would lead to a less petty, bigoted governing of Ireland than was being carried out by the Protestant Parliament. This is a major disappointment and let down to many Catholics who see this opportunity for Catholic emancipation pass by. And so now Roman Catholics are full citizens of the United Kingdom, but without the full rights of British citizens. In 1829, the Penal Laws that discriminate against Roman Catholics are eventually repealed after a campaign by Daniel O'Connell, who is the father of constitutional Irish nationalism.

So maybe things could be possibly heading in a more benign direction. However, it all takes a turn for the worse in the 1840s and 50s. In the late 1840s and early 50s there is the Irish Potato Famine. Because of the laws that had subdivided agricultural land into ever smaller plots, the only way to efficiently use that land in order to feed Irish families was to become incredibly reliant on potatoes, which could be grown in large quantities on small plots of land that weren't necessarily of the highest quality. This then leads to an over reliance on this one single crop, and when that crop fails it causes a disaster. Initially the British government had tried to enact some policies to alleviate the suffering of the Irish, but then those measures are repealed really out of partly A misplaced attitude that interfering in the market will prolong the famine. But also, it has to be said out of a bigoted sense on the part of many British officials that really the potato famine is justice because of the feckless laziness of the Irish. And if many of them die, well, that's really their fault. What is so outrageous about this is not just a million people die and a million people are forced to emigrate, but that the people who are dying are officially citizens of the United Kingdom. The British government presides over a policy that allows a million British citizens to die.

That is something that should never be forgotten about, and the Irish will always be completely within their own rights to say that the British government let them die in huge numbers. This total callous failure by the British state leads to a deep and justifiable bitterness by the Irish against the British government. By the time the Irish Free State is founded in the early 1920's, the Irish Catholic Church is overwhelmingly the most powerful institution in Irish life. So great is the monopoly on cultural power that the first Irish Prime Minister or T-shirt, WT Cosgrave, actually proposes in 1921 that a institution is created connected to the upper House of the Irish Parliament to scrutinize all legislation to make sure that it is in line with the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Even by the standards of 1920s Ireland, this is considered to be a step too far. But this is the island that Patrick Ryan is born into in 1930, into an island that has a long history of grievance against British rule, where Irish culture is steeped in this legacy, this mythology that combines the history of suffering with an intense sense of Irish nationalism, with also a fervent Irish Catholic identity. Ryan's early childhood is largely quite happy. He begins to be educated by the prestigious Christian Brothers institution that had produced so many of the leaders of the Irish Republican and Nationalist movement. However, Ryan's father Simon begins to slowly succumb to rheumatoid arthritis that eventually confines Ryan's father to bed and a cloud of sadness descends over the Ryan family.

As a result of Ryan's father's illness, Ryan has to leave school early and is not able to pursue the further educational opportunities that maybe would have seen him become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer and instead, at the age of 14, to join the Palatine Order and begin his training to be a Roman Catholic priest. Patrick Ryan joined the Palestine Order in 1944. He spent his time studying philosophy and he also enjoyed Gaelic sports, especially hurling. In June 1954 he was ordained and he was expecting, along with his family, to be positioned somewhere fairly close to home. Usually priests were put in a parish quite close to where they had been ordained at the start, but the Palatine order had different ideas for him and Brian was sent to East Africa, to Tanganyika.

It took him five days to reach his post in a part of the world that could not possibly have been more different from his native Tipperary. He would spend a largely happy period of time in Tanganika, drilling wells, Building Schools and also learning to fly. And he also arrived at a very crucial moment in the history of Africa. In the post World War 2 era, the European colonial empires were withdrawing. There was the growth of African nationalism. The winds of change were blowing through Africa as new hopes for independent, newly prosperous states began to emerge. But it wasn't just in Africa that the winds of change were also blowing.

The partitioning of Ireland was a messy process. Some unionist communities were left in the South of Ireland and large numbers of Catholic nationalists were also left in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, Roman Catholics faced discrimination in employment, in voting, in education, in housing and this from time to time would flare up into riots and marching. By the 1960s people began to demand more rights. It was a time when people were organizing the southern states of the USA in the civil rights movement, and it was believed that Roman Catholics who were meant to be equal citizens of Northern Ireland but were actually discriminated against very heavily, that they should have their own civil rights movement, That they shouldn't have to live in poverty and injustice and be the back of the queue for employment and housing.

And so from the 1960s onwards, you started to see in places like Derry or Londonderry, depending on which name you choose to use, the beginning of the civil rights movement. As the civil rights movement began, Ryan happened to be back in Ireland. He was on a break from his missionary work and he found himself in a bit of a no man's land. He didn't really have any responsibilities at the time and he was really looking to go back to Africa. He found the experience of being in Africa incredibly invigorating.

He both had the prestige of being a priest, but also he had the freedom to do his own thing. It wasn't like the Catholic Church had tremendous control over what was happening and could micromanage his day-to-day life as they could back in Ireland. He'd originally planned to go back to Tanganika, buy a plot of land and see out the rest of his days there. But the Catholic Church and the Palatine Order? They had different plans for Ryan and instead, much to his tremendous annoyance, he was sent to be a Catholic priest in Barking in London.

His old life of flying a small plane to distant communities, directing the construction of schools and clinics, interspersed with his true love, which was to go hunting, especially for elephants. That was gone and it was now replaced with the mundane life of being a parish priest. Births, deaths, marriages, baptisms, confessions, Carol services. He saw his job as a Catholic priest not as ministering to his parishioners and leading them in their journey and relationship with Christ.

He instead saw it as a sort of boring process of box ticking and administrative duties that he cared very little for. Despite his fervent Catholic upbringing, the freedom of Tanganyika had awoken A thirst for excitement within him that he just wasn't able to experience whilst living in London. There were small rituals within his job as a parish priest that he found incredibly grating. So one of them was that he would have to greet all of his congregation as they walked into church, shake their hands, say hello. And he found that many of them looked at him as if they were doing him some sort of favour by coming to church, that he wasn't being treated with the same kind of respect. At least back in Ireland, which is such an overwhelmingly Catholic country, where the Catholic Church was held in such high esteem, he at least had a certain prestige with being a Catholic priest.

But he didn't even have that in England. And so he began to chafe against the system and looked for a way to potentially get out of this. In 1969 his mother became increasingly I'll and he took this as an opportunity to try and return to Ireland. The way he presented this to the Palatine Order was that he wanted to be there to administer the last rites to his mother, and he also volunteered to travel around Ireland collecting the church collection boxes for his particular order. Maybe I can kill two birds with a stone, take care of my mother and also carry out this job for the Palatine Order. And they agreed.

The great benefit of being back in Ireland is that he would have the social prestige, the deference and the respect that would go with being a Catholic priest without being burdened with the administrative duties of actually having to perform things like Mass and do all the things that he seemed to genuinely find so tedious about being a priest. Whilst he's back in Ireland, the troubles in Northern Ireland begin to boil over. Tensions had been building and in October 1968 television screens around the world were flooded with images of the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and overwhelmingly Protestant police force baton charging and beating civil rights protesters in Londonderry.

The government of Northern Ireland proposed a package of reforms, but this didn't go far enough. The civil rights movement was seeking to end decades of sectarian discrimination that Catholics have been subject to. But for many loyalists. For many people in Northern Ireland who were pro British, they saw the civil rights movement as being essentially the vanguard of the Irish republican movement. Of an attempt by the republican movement that had never accepted not just the legitimacy of Northern Ireland, but had never accepted the idea that the people of Northern Ireland were even entitled to any say at all of their own future to force Irish unification upon them.

You have to remember just how hostile the Irish Republic really was to Northern Ireland. The Irish Republic's constitution stated until 1998 that it was the official objective of the Irish state to annex Northern Ireland. And this bred a incredible sense of fear, of trepidation and of suspicion, not just of the Irish Republic but also of Irish nationalists within Northern Ireland, amongst Irish unionists, amongst Ulster Unionists.

In the late 60s, rioting between Catholics and Protestants, especially in the City of Londonderry, continued to get worse and it got to the point whereby the British government started to believe that the RUC could no longer maintain peace on the streets of Ulster. And one of the reasons, of course, for that is that the RUC, one of the causes of the rioting, they weren't good faith actors trying to maintain peace between Catholics and Protestants.

They were a Protestant organization. They had a small number of Catholics in them, but the two communities were treated very differently in policing. And so for that reason, the British government decided that they were going to have to, in 1969, send the British Army into Northern Ireland to keep the peace. They believed that they would just be there for a few weeks. They were just going to be there to help tensions simmer down.

They ended up being deployed into Northern Ireland for 30 years. Now, initially, Roman Catholics welcomed the British Army. I mean, at least these guys coming from England, Wales and Scotland aren't going to be local Protestants fuelled by prejudice and hatred. But unfortunately, the tensions and the reality of launching what does this say? What was effectively a military operation in civilian areas meant the relationships between the Catholic community and the British Army very, very quickly broke down. As violence spread throughout Northern Ireland, many Catholics began to leave the country and the sights of Catholic women and children turning up in the South of Ireland had a huge psychological effect on many people. One of the reasons that the rioting was so intense is that it was fairly common in the period between the partitioning of Ireland and the outbreak of the Troubles for Catholics and Protestants to live in the same areas. They weren't necessarily divided in the way that tragically many Catholic and Protestant communities are to this day. And so you would have pockets of Catholics living amongst Protestants, pockets of Protestants living amongst Catholics.

And you'd have people like Ian Paisley, who is a firebrand loyalist Protestant pastor in Belfast, who would whip his congregations up into frenzies of outrage and hatred about the deprivations and wickedness of Roman popery in the immorality and corrupting influence that these Catholics are going to have on the Protestants. He would stand in his church and he would read the names and addresses of Roman Catholics who lived in Protestant areas and send Protestant parishioners out to to burn these families out of their houses and beat them up.

Ryan found himself increasingly drawn to the events that were unfolding in Northern Ireland and his natural republican sympathies, coupled with maybe the suggestion that he was looking for something a little bit more exciting than baptizing babies and hearing confessions. His access to the money boxes of the Palatine Order provided him with his first in to the Irish Republican Army. He started to siphon off some of the money and pass it over to the IRA and the Palestine Order knew straight away. They started to wonder, how come the amounts of money that you're providing us are getting small?

And he was very honest about it. I'm giving it to the IRA. They told him in no uncertain terms was he to immediately stop doing just that. But Patrick Ryan have now begun to take those first steps into the world of the Irish Republican Army. Steps that would take him all the way to Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and would make him one of the most important figures in the IRA struggle with the British government. Before we dive back into the story of Patrick Ryan, Colonel Gaddafi and the IRA, just a quick word from our sponsor, World of Whiskey.

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But in those long dark decades for the IRA of the 30s and 40s up to the 1960s, they found that they were running very short of men, very short of weapons, and even crucially, very short of any kind of really popular support. In a meeting of the IRA Army Council in 1967, they found out that they only had 200 active members. In December 1969, under the pressure of the growing tension and violence in Northern Ireland, the IRA began to creak.

It began to split. The Old IRA that wanted to take a more conventional approach and the New IRA that wanted a more aggressive in your face approach to take the fights to, as they saw it, the British occupiers. As tensions rose in Ulster, the IRA were flooded with recruits. However, there's one thing the IRA couldn't get their hands on arms. Now initially the IRA had turned their attention to the US as a source for armaments and funds and there were people in the USA that did raise money and organise shipments of weapons to the IRA, but they couldn't really get a regular supply of guns and money coming through. It was at this time that Ryan began to try and make himself useful to the IRA.

You have to remember that Ryan was an active priest within 1960s Ireland. There was tremendous prestige and respect that was attached to being an active Catholic priest within Irish culture. It opened doors that other professions simply couldn't. People looked up to priests. They admired them as leaders of the community. The IRA didn't really have a particularly great relationship with the Catholic priesthood. Very often the Catholic priesthood had encouraged people to stay away from the IRA.

So when Patrick Ryan approaches the IRA and starts to give them money, even small amounts, it's something that the IRA immediately sees a potential opportunity that they can really use. Ryan is introduced to a man called Tom O'Sullivan, who is the commander of the IRA in County Tipperary. And this is that time when the IRA had been desperately trying to find a way to get new weapons. Initially they had been shipping them in from New York on a route that we go from New York to Southampton. They could then pick them up in Southampton and ship and then ship them across from Holyhead in the north of Wales to Dublin. But that had been discovered.

Customs officials in Southampton had found suitcases that turned out to be incredibly heavy that were full of bullets and guns and hand grenades. The IRA needed to find some new source of weaponry. It was at this point that the IRA are approached by a man called Yang Goulet. Yang Goulet was a extreme Breton nationalist. He had given his life to the cause of securing the independence of Brittany from France, but he was living at the time in Ireland where he was working as a sculptor, and we will get on to why he was living in Ireland very soon.

He had been born in Brittany in 1914. During the Second World War he had been drafted into the French army to fight against the Germans, but France has been defeated in 1940 and most French soldiers are then interned for the duration of the war or are shipped off to Germany to be essentially slave labours. But Goulet doesn't face that fate. Instead he's released by the Germans. And the reason that he's released is because he's an extreme Breton nationalist who's willing to do anything to bring about the independence of Brittany. And he ends up forming a pro Nazi militia to support German occupation of France, because to him, German occupation of France is just the same as French occupation of Brittany. After the liberation of France, he ends up fleeing France, going to live in Ireland where he gains Irish citizenship. And he works as a sculptor.

He lives very publicly as a man who is convicted as a Nazi collaborator in Ireland. He doesn't change his name. He doesn't do any of that. He just lives very publicly. But Galet wasn't just a sculptor and he wasn't just an extreme Breton nationalist. He was also someone who had connections, someone who had connections that the IRA could find very, very useful. He had connections with the government of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.

On the 1st of September 1969, Colonel Gaddafi had taken part in a coup that had overthrown the King of Libya and made Gaddafi dictator for life. Colonel Gaddafi was a firebrand Arab nationalist who saw himself as a champion of what he called anti imperialism. In Gaddafi's case, anti imperialism basically meant any movement that he didn't particularly like. And this is a very important moment in the history of Libya, because Libya for the previous several decades had been incredibly poor.

But in the late 1960s, Libya finds itself sitting on a newly discovered ocean of oil. And this all of a sudden transforms the economic fortunes of Libya from being a poor, undeveloped society to being a nation that is flush with cash and with a new radical leader willing to spend on causes that he supported. Colonel Gaddafi was willing to open the chequebook to any organization from the Philippines to Colombia that he believed fit his description of quote UN quote, anti imperialism or anti colonialism.

He got the cheque book out for the Red Brigade of Italy, for Bardemainho, for Germany of the PLO in Palestine. But there was 1 country that Colonel Gaddafi had in particular hatred of and that country was Great Britain. Gaddafi had visited Britain as a young army officer and come away with feelings of hatred and disgust. And Gaddafi wasn't a man who let things slide. He charged Yang Goulet to approach the IRA and to try and make a deal whereby he could support them with weapons to cause as much terror and anarchy for the British government and the British people. Possible.

Gaddafi was causing chaos and anarchy throughout his own country as well as in others. Libya had previously been an Italian colony and it had quite a large Italian community. In 1970, he ordered all of the Italians living in Libya to leave. He expelled the lot of them, and he also decided to expel the Jewish community of Libya, saying that it was a fifth column for Israel. Of course, this is completely untrue, but this was a time when all of the Jewish communities in the Middle East were being expelled from their countries. From Morocco to Syria to Lebanon to Iraq, Jewish communities were being spelled in their hundreds of thousands, and I guess Gaddafi just wanted to fit in.

So 1971, Gaddafi charges Yang Goulet to approach the IRA. As a result of an initial meeting between the IRA and Goulet, the IRA end up sending a delegation to Tripoli for more high level talks as to how the Libyan government can support the IR as campaign of terror. The Libyan government agrees to provide small arms, mines, rocket propelled grenades, cash, whatever they can. Initially they can only provide relatively small quantity because it's one thing to agree to provide the armaments, it's another thing entirely to get weaponry from North Africa into Ireland.

They initially arranged some flights, but the airplanes crash off the coast of Ireland and only very small amounts of weaponry gets through to the IRA. However, some of the weapons do get through and on the 20th of November 1972, the IRA use the weapons provided by Colonel Gaddafi's Libya for the very first time. The IRA attack a small police station run by the IUC in County Fermanagh. They kill a police officer called Robert Keys. He was 55 years old, married to a woman called Lillian and the father of six children.

The IRA are delighted with their great success of this operation. Gloriously, the supposed freedom fighters of the IRA have made Lillian Keys a widow and deprived 6 children of their father. But the IRA have a bit of a problem that they have these weapons, but only in a small number. The potential for the damage that they could do if they could secure a regular supply of heavy weaponry from a regime like Colonel Gaddafi's Libya.

I mean, think of how many orphans and widows they could make if they could just get that. They could take their widow making operation to a whole new level. But how to do that? It's all well and good for Gaddafi to make promises, but the Libyans have been very clear that they will not provide transportation, just the weaponry. So the IRA need a man, a man who holds a unique status within society, a man who can open doors, a man with a sense of adventure and a man who's used to doing a bit of travelling.

They need a man like Father Patrick Ryan to be their connection between the IRA Army Council and the government of Colonel Gaddafi. In our next episode of Ancient to Reason, we are going to look at just how the Patrick Ryan, the Padre, became the man who armed and finance the IRA with the guns and money of Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. My name is Joseph Parkinson. Thank you for listening to Ancient to Recent. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Friday, available on Spotify, Apple Podcast and YouTube.