Bullets and Rosary Beads — Part 2

The heat was stifling. The air was heavy, the constant squawking of seagulls as they fought each other for sardines and other scraps of food left behind by tourists and local fishermen. The air was a mixture of spices and the brine of seawater. Welcome to Libya. Welcome to Colonel Gaddafi's Tripoli, the place that Father Patrick Ryan had made his way to. A place that couldn't possibly be more different from Patrick Ryan's home of County Tipperary in Ireland.

Ryan had made his way to Libya on behalf of the Irish Republican Army, a movement committed to the unification of Ireland, A cause a dream of Irish nationalists for decades, ever since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s at the end of the Irish War of Independence, Ryan was trying to make himself conspicuous in Tripoli. He knew he was being watched by the Libyan security services who had invited him to come visit them, but upon inviting him, hadn't made any specific date or time to see him.

They were simply going to sit back, see how he carried himself. Was he going to act like some sort of juvenile revolutionary tourist, or was he going to understand the gravity of the situation? So every day Ryan got up in his hotel, went down, had his breakfast of fruit and coffee. He wandered through the cities, he saw the sights, he took in some of the culture, and he presented himself at every moment as a sober, professional man with a serious mission. But there was also another possibility. There were other people who maybe could be watching Father Patrick Ryan.

There was MI 5, the British intelligence services, Were they there? Did they know about him already? Patrick Ryan didn't know. And the Libyans knew that Patrick Ryan didn't know. And so they were making sure that he was behaving himself in a mature manner, that he wasn't going to blow this. Eventually, after a number of days, Ryan was passed a note by a receptionist at his hotel. All it said was a date and a time. And he knew that this was an invitation for him to meet his contacts within Colonel Gaddafi's government.

Ryan met with his contacts within the Libyan government, and they informed him that they were going to make a stock of weapons available to him. 5 tons, 247 AK, 40 sevens, 246 bayonets, 243 revolvers, 100 anti tank mines, 24,000 rounds of ammunition, 500 grenades, 300 kilos of jelignite and 48 lbs of high explosives. This was a devastating arsenal. This was the kind of heavy weaponry that, in the right hands, could turn the tide of the conflict in Northern Ireland. It could take the IRA, poorly equipped with a few machine guns and a few handguns, from being a nuisance capable of assassinating a police officer here or a soldier there, into a serious fighting force that maybe, just maybe, had the power to wrench Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and bring about, through armed struggle, the reunification of the island of Ireland, the dream of Irish Republicans for two generations. But there was a catch.

The Libyans had originally promised 100 tons, but this time they were only providing 5, and they weren't willing to make any provisions for the transportation of the weapons to Ireland. Ryan needed to sort that out himself, so he ended up approaching a ship's captain from Germany called Gunter Linehauser, and he arranged for the shipment of weapons and cash to be shipped to the South of Ireland, where it could then be collected by members of the IRA and used as part of the armed struggle in Northern Ireland.

Ryan himself would not travel on the Claudia. He would travel separately, but senior members of the IRA would be on the Claudia, including Joe Cahill, the IRA's Quartermaster General. Ryan had had his suspicions that maybe he was being tracked by MI 5, the secret services of Great Britain and they were well founded. You see, the British knew all about Ryan's trip to Libya. They had been watching the Claudia for several months and on the 23rd of March 1973, when the Claudia set sail from Tripoli to the South of Ireland, an urgent telegram was sent from the Foreign Secretary, Alex Douglas, home to Arthur Goldsworth, the British Ambassador in Dublin, telling them that the Claudia was on the way.

The British knew when the ship was leaving and the British knew exactly where the ship was going. As the Claudia sailed through the Mediterranean, pass through Gibraltar, rounded the Iberian Peninsula and made its way towards Irish waters, it was shadowed by the Royal Navy. Welcome to ancient to recent my name is Joseph Parkinson and today we will be covering Part 2 of our series on the life of Father Patrick Ryan, the IRA priest, the man who armed the Irish Republican Army with the money and the guns of Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are brought to you by the worldofwhiskey.co.uk, the premier place for whiskey cask investment.

Check out the World of Whiskey Co UK. Check their website out, they have fantastic range of options there to get involved in whiskey cask investment. We will hear more from them later. Today's episode is based on the fantastic book The Padre by Jennifer O'Leary. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Friday. You can listen on YouTube, Apple Podcast or Spotify. The British had an ally and that ally was Liam Cosgrove. He was the new T-shirt called Prime Minister of the Irish Republic and he was a man fired with a deep hatred and resentment against the IRA and radical Irish republicanism. You see, he was a man whose formative memory as a child was the pain, the bloodshed and the misery of the Irish Civil War. After the Easter Rising, there was the Irish War of Independence.

But Irish history didn't turn out in the way it was supposed to turn out in the eyes of many radical Irish Republicans who saw any compromise with the British as being completely unacceptable. Instead of a glorious romantic moment where the forces of Irish republicanism take on the evil forces of British colonialism and defeat them and drive the last vestiges of British imperial power into the ocean. Instead of that happening, what happened was the Anglo Irish Treaty. What happened was the partitioning of Ireland, the creation of Northern Ireland still is part of the United Kingdom, which Irish Republicans view as illegitimate, and the acceptance of that in the South, which also, in the eyes of many Irish Republicans, created a second illegitimate state, the Irish Free State.

The fighting of the Civil War was over whether the South should accept the Anglo Irish Treaty. From the very inception of the South of Ireland as a separate state from Great Britain, there were some people within the Irish republican movement who fundamentally saw that state as being a remnant of colonialism, as being illegitimate. And so during the 1920s and 30s and 40's, the IRA in some form lingered on as a permanent rejection of the existence of the legitimacy of the Irish state.

And the government in Dublin had to fight very, very hard to establish its legitimacy over the 26 counties of the Irish Republic in the teeth of opposition from elements within the Irish Republican movement. Always aware that this republican movement could come back, could resurface and could potentially pose a lethal threat to the legitimacy of the government in Dublin. There was a real chance as events unfolded tragically in Northern Ireland, that this could be exactly the catalyst, exactly the spark that could bring about that collapse of authority in the South of Ireland that could undermine the government in Dublin and then could potentially lead to resumption of the Irish Civil War. Not just the fighting in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, unionists and Republicans, British and Irish, but fighting in the South of Ireland between hardcore Republicans and more constitutional Irish nationalists.

There was a very real possibility, and a possibility that Liam Cosgrove was determined to avoid. As Leader of the opposition in Ireland in 1970, he had informed then Irish tea shirk Jack Lynch that there were members of his own government who had been implicated in the illegal importation of armaments that was said to be destined to the IRA in Northern Ireland. And this actually forced the resignation of two government ministers, Charles Hohey and Neil Blaney. Hohey would go on to eventually become Tea Shook himself. Now both of them denied the accusations and both of them end up having the charges either dropped or being acquitted. But there was still that sense that there was a divide in loyalty within the South.

And so if Cosgrave was going to allow the importation of armaments into the South of Ireland, the recruitment of IRA members and their transportation to Northern Ireland to fight the British, he knew that could fundamentally undermine the legitimacy of the Irish state. But at the same time, if he came out and was too pro British, that could also undermine the legitimacy of the Irish state. So he had to walk a very narrow path. By March of that year 1973, 380 people had already been killed in fighting in Northern Ireland and the Irish government as well as the British government knew that the delivery of 5 tons of rifles, Kalashnikovs, explosives into the hands of the Irish Republican Army was only going to lead to the death toll spiralling and potentially unleashing that worst case scenario of civil unrest in the South of Ireland as well as the North.

The Claudia made its way through the surf, determined on its way to the South of Ireland, carrying it's deadly cargo. The plan was that the Claudia would arrive about a mile off the coast of the South of Ireland, drop anchor, and then local members of the IRA would sail out in smaller ships, unload the cargo onto the smaller ships and ferry that onto the land where other members of the IRA could collect it and transport it to the north.

But a few days before the Claudia arrived, the captain and crew started to become suspicious that maybe that they were being observed, maybe they were being followed. They started to see a Periscope of a submarine appearing that seemed to be tracking them. This was something that was made aware to Joe Cahill, the senior member of the IRA on the ship. But this is the 1970s in the Atlantic, at the height of the Cold War. There's all sorts of submarines.

They could be Soviet, they could be French, they could be American. They could be anything. And so the crew, they just kind of think, well, I mean, it's kind of likely if we're sailing through the Atlantic that we're probably going to see something. So they just kind of dismiss it. They put it out of their minds. A few days later, though, they see another Periscope. Coincidence. Or were they being followed? The captain summons Jo Kar Hill to the bridge and he shows him the radar and it seems to be that there are certain ships in the area that one could, if one was of a suspicious mind, believe that the pattern of their movements seemed to be that they were shadowing the Claudia, observing her. They also started to see aeroplanes appearing in the sky that seemed to circle and then head back. This was increasingly raising the suspicion of the crew and the IRA members.

But they persisted. They had a plan, they had a cargo, they had worked so hard to bring together the shipment of weapons and the money and the potential that this could have on the conflict in Northern Ireland was too huge. They had come too far to turn back. But their suspicions were correct. They were sailing into a trap. As the Claudia passed through international waters into the territorial waters of the Irish Republic, 3 Irish naval ships began to shadow it when the Claudia was only one mile out from the coast, at a point when ships had already departed from the coastline carrying IRA members on the way to the Claudia to start unloading the deadly cargo. At that very moment, the Irish ships turn their lights on, catching the crew and the IRA members at surprise and immediately boarded.

Joe Cahill's first awareness that something wrong was happening was when he woke up with a gun pressed to his head by a member of the Irish Navy. But even in their panic, even at the moment where all seemed to be lost, they had come this far with their cargo that had so much promise. Even then, one member of the IRA thought very quickly, tying a length of rope to the suitcase that had hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars and 10s of thousands of pounds provided by Colonel Gaddafi's government. He threw it over the side to make sure that it wouldn't fall into the hands of the Irish government of the hated forces of the Irish Free State.

On board the Claudia, the crew and the IRA members were arrested. The small ship that had taken off that was already carrying members of the IRA back to the shore was caught up with by the Irish Navy. But all was not lost for the IRA. You see the IRA had friends in the South of Ireland and one of them was a local fisherman called Pax Whelan. And Pax Whelan was a dedicated committed hardcore republican. He had been a commander within the IRA on the anti treaty side during the Irish Civil War and he too harboured the dream of one day bringing about a united island through the force of arms. And so the IRA members were able to approach Pax Whelan, a man who had spent years and years trawling and fishing off the South Coast of Ireland, and explain the situation to him. There's a suitcase, it's full of money. It's for the cause of the liberation of Northern Ireland from the forces of British imperialism. We're thrown her over the side.

We want to find this. Can you help us? And he says yes, He's able to gather together some local fishermen and use their knowledge of tide and weather chart to figure out where maybe this suitcase could be. But they also knew that they were against the clock. They had two formidable foes. The first was the sea itself. The swirling current of the ocean could mean that this suitcase could be bashed against the rock and unleash all the money into the water. It would then be completely lost to the IRA. The second foe was the Irish Navy. They would also be combing the area. Divers from the Irish Navy were submerging themselves deep in the waters looking for this suitcase and police officers from the Garda, the Irish police force, were also combing the coast looking for anything that washed up, anything that might fall into the hands of the IRA.

They were going to be there to pick it up. So they knew, the IRA knew that they were up against some formidable foes and against the clock, but they had this vast wealth of local knowledge of local talent helping them. And the fishermen were able to go out using their charts, using their knowledge of the local current. And one of them was able to see bobbing in the water, the length of rope that had been attached to the suitcase was able to grab it, tie it to the side of his boat and sail it almost underneath the noses of the Irish Navy, back to the coast.

Father Patrick Ryan had made his way down to the South of Ireland, alongside with another map called Marcus Fogarty. Ryan and Fogarty were able to retrieve the suitcase from Pax Wieland, but it had been in the Atlantic. It was absolutely drenched. The briny seawater had rendered the cash absolutely useless unless they took a drastic course of action. They were determined to make sure that something came out of the weeks and months of planning, that something came out of this connection with Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and the journey of the Claudia.

So they took over a local rented cottage, and they set out to save every single dollar, every single pound, every single note of the money in the suitcase. They had to fill the bathtub full of water, wash the seawater out of every single bill, hang the bills up individually on pegs on a washing line, then take turns between the two of them, taking a hair dryer to dry out each bill, and then iron the bills to finally make them usable. It took them three days of constant non-stop 24 hours washing, drying, ironing, but they managed to save the entirety of 100,000 U.S. dollars and 16,000 lbs of notes. The Claudia was turned around by the Irish authorities and told to get out of Irish territorial waters and to never return, ever, under any circumstances.

Joe Cahill and Dennis McKinney, the Quartermaster General and Chief of Staff of the IRA, were both put on trial alongside the other IRA members in Dublin. Cahill received a three-year prison sentence. Dennis Mccleary Dennis Mccleary received a two year prison sentence and I'm being LED from the court. After his sentencing, Cahill said that his only regret is that he had not been able to complete his operation as a loyal soldier of the Irish Republican Army and congratulated the judge on doing his duty to his British colonial overlords.

This was the face of the IRA in the South of Ireland. This was the face of the institution that T-shirt Liam Cosgrove feared and hated so much. If you believe, as the IRA do, that they are on a sacred mission entrusted to them by generations of the patriot dead of Ireland, the martyrs fighting for the liberation of the Irish people, of the Irish nation, of the sacred soil of Ireland from the forces of British colonial rule.

If you believe this, then you believe that you have marching with you truth, that your banner is justice itself. Then you are not only empowered, not only entitled, but you are required. You are compelled to do whatever it takes to break any law, to contravene any taboo, to do whatever is required to bring about the fulfillment of the historic mission of the Irish Republican movement, the creation of united and republican island free of any British influence whatsoever and things like courts and laws and judges, and certainly the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland are irrelevant.

The people of Northern Ireland who don't want to be part of the Irish Republic stand in the way of you achieving your historical mission. They are illegitimate by definition. That is how the IRA, that is how Joe Cahill, that is how Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness saw it. Before we dive back into the story of Father Patrick Ryan, the IRA and Colonel Gaddafi, a quick word from our sponsor, World of Whiskey. Some things only get better with age.

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Remember to drink responsibly and invest responsibly. And a great place to start is with worldofwhiskey.co dot UK. In Northern Ireland things went from bad to worse. In an effort to get hold of the cycle, the spiral of violence, the British government decided to introduce internment where the British security forces would arrest and hold people without trial. On the 9th of August 1971, troops from the British Armed Forces raided hundreds of homes throughout Belfast, Derry and other cities, all of them in republican areas, sweeping up hundreds of people, all of them young Irish Catholic men from nationalist backgrounds who lived in nationalist areas. The idea of this was that they were going to, in one felled swoop, cripple the IRA, take off the streets, dozens if not hundreds of members of the IRA, and that would cripple the Iras capacity to carry out terrorist attacks. But the intelligence that they were working with was very often old or incredibly poor quality.

And so all that happened was that young men who simply happened to live in Irish Catholic areas ended up having their front doors kicked in, their families, their wives, their children, traumatized first thing in the morning, being dragged out of their beds and thrown in prison. Instead of crippling the IRA, this created a wave of sympathy for them, and it LED also to a upsurge in violence. The flames of sectarian tension and outrage continued to burn ever stronger in Northern Ireland and the incompetent reaction of the police and security forces that just tarred anyone from a Catholic or Irish background as being a potential terrorist sent hundreds of men into the arms of the IRAA.

Wave of riots and shootings and bombings swept Northern Ireland as tensions rose. 23 people were killed in three days, including ten people killed in the Ballymurphy massacre where British troops shot and killed unarmed civilians in the streets of Belfast. There was Francis Quinn 19 years old, Father Hugh Mullen 38, Joan Connolly 44, Daniel Taggart 44, Noel Phillips 20, Hugh Gilmore 17, William Nash 19, John Young 17, Michael Mcdade 20 and Kevin Mccullinney age 17.

Just some of the innocent lives lost in the horror of the Troubles. The Claudia episode LED Father Patrick Ryan to make 2 decisions. He had found his experience of working with other members of the IRA to be quite fractious, and so he decided that he wasn't ever going to officially join the Irish Republican Army. The idea of being part of a hierarchy where he had superiors who could make demands of him who he had to answer to, it just struck him as too much like being a Catholic priest again.

And he officially still was a Roman Catholic priest. He just was taking the paycheck and had all the privileges at this moment without actually doing things like Mass or baptizing babies. And he didn't want to submit himself to another hierarchy that he couldn't control, that he would find constraining. He decided that he would offer his services to the IRA on a freelance basis. They could take it or leave it and at the same time he reserved the right to walk away if he ever felt the need to.

The second decision that Ryan took was that he wanted to spend his time away from Ireland. He believed that he could do the most good for the 'cause that he was fighting for by being on the continent or being in Libya. So he travelled back to France and he was hoping that from France he would be able to get a visa to go to Libya where he could be the IRA point man with the Gaddafi regime. Now the 1970s was a period of tremendous turmoil in Western Europe and France was feeling the pinch. There was rising unemployment, there was sky high prices, there was stagnating economic growth.

There was the perception of the decline of standard living. And one of the big reasons for this was the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Egypt and Syria had attacked Israel during the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. The conflict would subsequently be known as the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis were initially taken by surprise and the Egyptian and Syrian armies made significant headway. However, the Israelis eventually rallied, pushed the Egyptians and Syrians back, and one of the reasons that they were able to do this is that in the moment of crisis for Israel, Israel was able to call upon the United States of America and other Western nations to provide it with weapons to continue to fight in the battlefield. This had caused outrage in the Arab world that just as the moment had arrived when the Arabs were going to finally destroy the state of Israel and drive the Jews into the ocean, that the USA and the old colonial powers, it was perceived that those nations had ridden to the rescue of Israel. And So what the Arab nations had decided to do was they had decided to launch a oil embargo on the West. The Western economies were heavily reliant upon oil, and the country that had set the example for being able to do this was Libya.

After Libya had become independent in the 1950s, it was an incredibly poor country. But in 1959, in a part of Libya called Sirte, Vast oceans of oil have been discovered that almost overnight transformed Libya from being a backwater to being a centre of the production of the most important natural resource in the world, and from being an incredibly impoverished country to being one of the potentially most wealthy countries in the world. After Gaddafi had come to power, he started to demand that the oil companies pay a higher price for their oil. The oil companies initially had stood their ground, but Gaddafi said to them, the Arabs did with our oil for thousands and thousands of years.

If you won't pay us what we believe we are entitled, we will simply stop production. So you can make some money at the new price or you can make no money. It's up to you. And Gaddafi called the oil companies bluff and forced them to meet his price. This example was then followed by the Shah of Iran and also by the government of Saudi Arabia. And it showed the Arab and Middle Eastern countries that they actually had some power, and this was a weapon that they would then wield against the West. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the days of cheap oil for the West were over.

The West wanted oil. It would pay the premium price. Gaddafi was a man who was motivated by a kind of anarchic revolutionary nationalism. He was principally an Arab nationalism, but he saw Arab nationalism as a front in a global conflict against imperialism and colonialism. And so he started to finance other organizations that Barden Meinhof in Germany or FARC in Colombia and the IRA were on the list of organizations that Gaddafi was eager to finance.

Gaddafi even spoke publicly about his willingness to support the IRA, which caused tremendous political tension with Great Britain in 1974. Ryan travels to Tripoli and as he's travelling to Tripoli, he notices long lines of businessmen flying from France to be part of the oil boom that's taking place in Libya. Once again, Ryan does what he did previously the last time he was in Libya. He doesn't knock on the door of the government.

He lays low. He knows that he's being watched. He knows that he's being observed. He knows that the Libyans are watching him. He knows that probably the British are watching him too. So he just checks into his hotel and he waits to be contacted. It is while he's in Libya that he actually meets Gaddafi himself. He's introduced to Colonel Gaddafi. He never told anyone what they said in private, but he did meet with Colonel Gaddafi personally on several occasions.

He's instructed by his new Libyan handlers after they reach out to him that there's going to be a new plan. They're going to leave packages for him are the Libyan embassies in Rome and Paris, weapons and money for him to collect And he can then construct a network of IRA mules of young men and women who take the ferry from the South of Ireland over to Lahav to meet up with Ryan and collect the cash and bring it back to Ireland to go into the coffers of the IRA. 9 year old Bernadette and three-year old Carol Mccool were sleeping in their bedroom in Derry in June 1970 when an explosion ripped through their house and claimed their lives.

Their mother and three siblings managed to survive. Thomas Mccool, alongside another man called Joseph Coyle were found dead and Thomas Carlin was found in a neighbour's garden. This had taken place in a city that was already on the edge. The simmering sectarian tension was on the verge of boiling over. Rioting had broken out over the recent arrest of Bernadette Devlin, a civil rights activist who had been participating in fighting with the police in the rise of the previous summer of 1969, the Battle of the Bogside.

She had appealed to the House of Lords, the upper House of the British Parliament, to get her six month prison sentence quashed, but that appeal had been rejected. That had added to the sense of grievance, the sense of outrage, the sense of frustration that was so palpable amongst many Catholics and the sense of fear that was so real for many Protestants. The explosion that claimed the lives of those two little girls, Bernadette and Carol, was thought to be accidental. Maybe there had been a gas leak, someone had lit a cigarette and some tragedy had claimed the lives of these innocent girls. But suspicion was aroused when the father, Thomas Mccool, was given an IRA funeral.

The forensics team that investigated the fire discovered chemicals and mechanisms that they instantaneously recognized as being part of the planning and preparation of an IRA bomb. A bomb that Mccool and Coyle and Carlin had all been working on in the kitchen while two small girls slept in the room above. This is a bomb that they had been building to kill other people, but tragically it had gone off and killed them and those two girls instead. Such mistakes were quite common for the IRA. The bomb makers of the IRA were amateurs, and they were also working with very rudimentary technology, and as such, a bomb that was being built by amateur bomb makers was just as likely to kill the bomb makers as it was to kill anyone else. If the IRA was going to become a more effective force, it needed to be able to learn from its mistakes, which meant that it needed its bomb makers to gain more experience by not blowing themselves up.

By the end of 1970, the IRA had planted 153 bombs. By the end of 1971 they planted 1000. In 1972 they carried out 1300 bomb attacks alone. Many innocent people, including children, were killed in these bomb attacks. Bernadette and Carol were not the only children that would die in IRA bombings. Martin McGuinness, who was the senior commander for the IRA in Derry, was asked by a journalist in April 1972 if it was inevitable that civilians would die in bombings that the IRA carried out. And he gave an answer that was as cruel as it was called, as callous as it was contemptuous.

He replied. That is quite right. You know, we have always given ample warning and anybody that was hurt was hurt by their own fault, being too nosy, sticking around the place where the bomb was after they were told to get clear. It has only been through their own fault that they have been hurt. See, the IRA was very concerned by the safety of their bomb makers, but was absolutely callous and contemptuous of the safety of the civilians whose lives would be claimed by those very bombs. In 1975, as Northern Ireland spiralled into a cycle of death and killing and maimings, Patrick Ryan was thousands of miles away.

Ryan had bought himself a camper van and he was travelling around Europe, shuttling between appointments, collecting money and weapons and dropping them off with his IRA contacts to be funnelled over to Ireland where they could be used to to kill more people. And one of the regular stops for Ryan as he travelled through Europe was Geneva, Switzerland. The Swiss banking system is notoriously secretive, never sharing information with any government no matter what the cause, and so it was a useful place for the depositing and collection of cash funnelled from the Libyans to the IRA.

And it was while in Geneva. Now Patrick Ryan was aware of this problem that IRA bomb makers were having of blowing themselves up before they got the opportunity to blow up other people. And Patrick Ryan happened to be strolling through Geneva and he passed the window of a shop displaying Swiss watches. And as part of the display, he noticed a set of small timers. This picked up his curiosity. It set the wheels turning in his mind.

He went into the shop and he he asked the shopkeeper, what what are these for? And the shopkeeper says, oh, these are memo. These are memo timers. They're something that local people use when they park their cars. And they put the money in the meter and the meter says you have so many hours. You can then set the timer and it will tell you exactly when you need to go back to your car to either put more money in or or drive it away. It allows people to time exactly when they need to make that journey.

And the light went off in Patrick Ryan's mind. Maybe we could use these timers in IRA bombs. You see, with the amateur design of IRA bombs, they had a very crude priming and triggering system that meant that if you were a little bit unlucky, the next victim of an IRA explosion would be the person building the bomb. And when as well, you're having people who are carrying out bombings and they're planting bombs under cars, they're having to carry the bombs with them. It's cold, it's rainy, they're having to get down on their knees to slide them, to attach them to the bottom of a car. It's very easy to press the wrong thing or push too hard on something, accidentally set the bomb off and kill yourself. But these memo timers, if used properly, if adopted properly, could potentially allow the IRA to develop more sophisticated priming systems that would allow them as well to be able to plant bombs, to go off hours, days, weeks, or even months in advance to be able to work on and develop bonds, more sophisticated bonds, gain more experience, work in a more safe environment, and allow the IRA to do the one thing it wanted to do to kill more people.

Brian went home, contemplated this development and then the next day he came back and he said to the storekeeper, how many of these do you have? And the storekeeper said, oh, got about got about 400 of them. Ryan said I will buy all of them, every single one of them. This would be the most significant contribution that Patrick Ryan would make to the entire cause of the IRA. This would have a bigger impact on the conflict then the money, the guns.

This one development would allow the IRA to plan operation, sophisticated operations to carry out precision attacks and to be able to plant bombs months before they were set to go off. This would begin the journey all the way to the Grand Brighton, the hotel in the South of England. This chance coincidental out of the blue meeting of a Catholic priest walking down the street in Geneva and a light just going off in his head as he sees a display of small Swiss watches in a window. This chance occurrence would provide the IRA with the ability to attempt to assassinate a sitting British Prime Minister, to take the war in Northern Ireland to a new level, and would play a key role in the most audacious attack in the entire history of the Troubles.

This was the first step on the journey to the Brighton bombing. My name is Joseph Parkinson. This has been Ancient to Recent. Ancient to Recent is sponsored by the worldofwhiskey.co.uk, the premier destination for whiskey cask investment. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Friday. They're available on Apple Podcast, YouTube and Spotify.