Bullets and Rosary Beads — Part 3

Things were a little bit too hot for Father Patrick Ryan in Ireland. After the failed attempt to ship weapons from Colonel Gaddafi's Libya that had been intercepted by the Irish Navy, he decided it was maybe time for him to lay low, maybe time for him to make his getaway. Maybe he could do more effective work for the IRA in their armed struggle against the British in Northern Ireland, outside of Ireland. So he decided to make his way to Paris. He could stay in touch with his Libyan contacts there, collecting money and guns to bring to the IRA without drawing too much attention, too much heat. But already Ryan was gaining A reputation. He was becoming notorious in security circles around Europe. Coming home one day, Patrick Ryan finds 2 bullets left in an ashtray for him.

A message from the French security services. We are watching you. We know what you're doing. Do not play your games here in Paris. So Ryan decides that he has to move on yet again. And he makes his way to Benidorm. Now Benidorm had once been a sleepy seaside fishing town, but with the rise of package holidays it had been transformed into a bustling city by the sea. Ryan arrived in Spain in Madrid on the 20th of November 1975, the very day of the death of the long term Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco.

But he decided that Madrid was maybe too obvious a place for him. So it was to Benidorm that Father Patrick Ryan went. Benidorm had everything that Ryan wanted. It was a beautiful city by the sea. He could enjoy going swimming every morning. But also in 1977 alone it had 12 million tourists, many of them Brits, and Ryan was able to purchase a studio flat and a high rise tower which he could turn into his European base of operation.

But he hadn't come to Benidorm to have fun. He considered himself a soldier in the Irish Republican movement dedicated to the removing of British power from Northern Ireland. And that's exactly why he was in Benidorm. He was on a mission, and that mission was to blow up British shipping in the Monte Carlo Bay. His idea was to be able to swim out to a British ship in the harbour, plant a mine on the side of it and swim back.

And for that reason he practiced his swimming every morning at 5:00 AM, trying to build up his strength. And he'd chosen one particular ship, a ship called the Brave Goose of Essex, 115 feet long super yacht owned by Sir Donald Gosling, a decorated veteran of the Royal Navy in the Second World War. But Gosling wasn't necessarily the target. The objective was to send a message to the British that even in the Mediterranean, they would never be safe. However, Ryan ended up abandoning his plan because the British weren't the only people using the Monte Carlo Bay. It was also being used by the IRA to bring weapons into Europe which they could then transport onto Ireland, and as such he didn't want to draw attention to the port. So Ryan settled into a life of passing himself off as a tourist.

The resort was flooded with young British tourists seeking sun sacks and sand, and many of them had a tendency to get themselves into trouble with the local police. Their drunken excapades would then result in weary British Consulate staff having to bail them out from the local jail cells and usually giving them a telling off and sending them back to the UK. And so Ryan came up with a plan. He was going to watch the local police station and see which consulate officials would have to come and go to collect British tourists who'd been arrested.

He could then stake out the local bars and restaurants to see where those consulate officials would go for coffee or for dinner or for drinks. And then he could introduce himself. He could ingratiate the himself with them. Maybe after a while they could become friends and he would find himself in these bars listening to these boards, consulate officials who'd gone into the diplomatic service of the United Kingdom in hope of maybe somewhat of a more exciting life than bailing out 19 year old drunk British tourists from prison in a Spanish holiday resort. Because Ryan knew how to manipulate people. He knew how to get close to people. He would use his training as a Catholic priest to let people open up to him in the hope of gaining their trust, in the hope of maybe being able to manipulate them in the service of the 'cause that he truly cared about the armed unification of Ireland.

Welcome to Ancient Theresa. My name is Joseph Parkinson and today is the final chapter of our enthralling story of Father Patrick Ryan, based on the fantastic book written by Jennifer O'Leary, The Padre. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Friday. They're available to listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple podcast, and they're brought to you by the worldofwhiskey.co.uk, the premier place for whiskey cask investment. During his days as a priest in London, Ryan had befriended a young woman by the name of Christine. Christine was a regular visitor to his church, even though she wasn't actually Catholic.

She was slim with dark hair, and she became infatuated with him. She maybe even fell in love with him. He began sending her postcards from France with pictures of the Champs Elysees or the Eiffel Tower on them, maybe inviting her to dream of a life where they could possibly be together. But what Christine didn't know is that she was just another person for Father Patrick Ryan to use in the cause of the armed struggle. She would come to stay with him for a few weeks at a time, and he even began to convince her to carry money for him back to the UK.

But she had a particular use that he required her services for. He was going to use her as bait, and so he asked her to meet him in Zurich. He started to suspect that he was being watched by the British security services. He started to sometimes hear a click after he'd picked the phone up, suspecting that it was MI 5 or MI 6, tuning in to listen to what he had to say, and so he arranged for her to come out to meet him in Zurich.

He suspected that they were being watched, and there's one way that could prove this. If as soon as Christine left Zurich and went back to the UK, she'd be pulled in by the police and questioned, then that would have revealed that he knew that the Brits were finally on to him. But what he didn't suspect is that he himself would be arrested. And so while he was in Switzerland, he was picked up by the Swiss police who then deported him. France wouldn't accept him and he ended up in Sweden making her way back to the UK.

Christine was indeed picked up by the British police. She refused to talk and she ended up giving the British authorities the story that she had been given by Father Patrick Ryan, which is that the money that she was carrying was cash that was supposedly going towards the construction of a house for Patrick Ryan back in Ireland. Christine had now served her purpose. She had flushed out the British security services. He now knew for a fact that they were watching him and having served her purpose, Patrick Ryan dropped her.

He didn't need her anymore. The Troubles continue to claim lives in the UK, Ireland and increasingly in continental Europe. Sir Richard Sykes had been the ambassador from the UK to Netherlands for two years. On the 22nd of March 1979 he was supposed to be chairing the opening of a new British school in the Netherlands. He was a decorated hero of the Second World War. He had participated in the D-Day landings and he knew all about the Iras tendency to target British diplomatic staff.

Only a few years before, the IRA had assassinated the British Ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart Biggs and Richard Sykes had been a close friend with you at Biggs. In August 1978, the IRA had planted bomb at various British Army bases in West Germany. The IRA were looking for soft targets. Targets where they could inflict maximum damage, maximum pain, maximum body count. Where they could bring the fight to the Brits, away from Northern Ireland, away from the high security levels, the roadblocks, the security checks. Maybe where the Brits least expected it. On the morning of the 22nd of March 1979, as Richard Sykes got into his car, two IRA men approached the car. They shot Sykes 4 times, once in the head, twice in the chest and once in the right arm.

They also shot 19 year old Carol Straub who is a footman and a Dutch national. Both men were unarmed. Both men were killed in cold blood. On the day Sykes was killed, Ryan was in Brussels. He was at a dinner party where his host, in passing, commented that her house backed onto the House of a British diplomat. Ryan didn't react to the news, he simply made a note of it. When people made comments like that, when they let slip little bits of information that could be of use to the IRA, you never reacted. You just simply made a note of it and moved on. But he would make a point of accepting any further dinner invitations from this particular host, knowing that every time he could use the invitation as an opportunity to carry out surveillance on the British diplomat's house. The British diplomat in question was Paul Homer, the deputy British ambassador to NATO.

And a mere 9 hours after the British ambassador to The Hague, Richard Sykes, had been killed, the operation to assassinate Paul Homer got under way. At 6:15 PM, two IRA gunmen approached a car close to Homer's house. They fired 8 times. They hit the target who slumped over and died. However, the man they had killed was not Paul Homer. It was Andrea Micho, a senior official at the Belgian Central Bank who just happened to be getting into his car just outside the House of Paul Homer.

This was a disaster for the Irish Republican Army. They had just carried out an operation where they had killed the civilian of an entirely neutral country, and Ryan had been central to the gathering of intelligence that had led to this disaster. Ryan had to lay low, first moving to a safe house and then to a monastery. Eventually Ryan made his way back to Ireland, to a village called Mullock Moor in County Sligo, near the border with Northern Ireland, not far from where Ryan was staying.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, the cousin of the Queen, former Chief of the British Defence Staff during the Second World War and the last British Viceroy of India, was on holiday with his family on the 27th of August 1979. The 29 foot long green and white boat, the Shadow 5, was docked 1/4 of a mile out to sea fishing for lobsters. On board was Mountbatten, his daughter Patricia, her husband, her husband's mother, their 2 twin 14 year old sons Timothy and Nicholas, and young Northern Irish boy called Paul Maxwell who is working a summer job as a boat boy.

Suddenly there was a huge explosion. The IRA had detonated a bomb on the boat. The IRA knew that there were three children on that boat. Lord Louis Mountbatten, his two grandchildren, both 14 years old, his daughter's mother-in-law and Paul Maxwell, a 15 year old boy, were all killed. John Maxwell, the father of Paul, rushed to the harbour to find the body of his son. On discovering what was left of his son, he cried in agony. Look what you've done to him.

I'm an Irishman. He's an Irishman. Is this the sort of island you want? The attack was carried out by Thomas McMahon. McMahon would be arrested in 1979 and given a life sentence, but he would be released under the Good Friday Agreement. Today, Thomas McMahon lives in a small town in Ireland in County Monaghan. John Maxwell, the father of Paul, has reached out on 2 separate occasions to talk to McMahon to ask him why did you kill his son?

But McMahon has on both occasions refused to meet the father of the 15 year old child that he killed. Just one of the three children that Thomas McMahon killed that day. Ryan was not involved in the bombing that killed the Mountbatten family and Paul Maxwell, but he was only 20 miles away at the time of the explosion. That same day, a British Army convoy would be ambushed in Warren Point in Northern Ireland. 2 bombs would explode, killing 18 British soldiers.

Ryan decided that yet again Ireland was too hot for him to stay in and that he would have to make his way to the continent. In 1981, one of the most grisly events in the entire brutal history of the Troubles would occur when 19 Republican prisoners starved themselves to death. Up until 1975, Republican prisoners had been designated as political prisoners and thus been given special status within British prisons. They had particular perks and privileges, such as being allowed to wear their own clothes.

But these rules had been changed and all prisoners had been treated the same. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political, it is crime, said British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But on the 1st of March 1981, Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA, refused to take food. Five days later, a shock by election would be called for the Westminster seat of Fermanagh, S Tyrone. It was decided by the Republican leadership to nominate Bobby Sands to stand for election and 40 days into his hunger strike he was elected as a member of the Westminster Parliament.

His election changed the face of the Troubles. The IRA would pursue a new strategy, electoral success and political violence, the Armalite and the ballot box. Sands would die on the 5th of May 1981 and violence would tear through Northern Ireland as outraged Roman Catholics blamed Margaret Thatcher for refusing to give in to the demands of the IRA. In the House of Commons. Mrs. Thatcher was defiant. Mr. Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life.

It was a choice his organization did not allow to its victims. Over the next three months, six members of the IRA and three members of the INLAA separate Republican organization would die in hunger strike. Bobby Sands, 27. Francis Hughes, 25. Raymond Mccrishie, 24. Joe McDonnell, 30. Martin Herson, 29. Kieran Dougherty, 25. Thomas McCauley, 23, Patsy O'Hara, 23, and Kevin Lynch, 25. This dramatic and tragic event captured international attention was front page news the world over. It focused the entire world on the bitterness, the hatred, the violence that was playing out in Northern Ireland. But there was one man paying particularly close attention. Colonel Myanmar Gaddafi, the leader of the Libyan regime. Before we dive back into the story of Patrick Father Before we dive back into the story of Father Patrick Ryan, a quick word from our sponsor, World of Whiskey. Some things only get better with age. A fine single malt is one of them. That's why Whiskey Cask Investing has such serious allure.

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You can click the link on My Buyer to see a link to theworldofwhiskey.co.uk and look at their great range of options for Whiskey Cask investment. Ryan was back in Dublin. He had a very important meeting, a date with destiny to keep. He was going to meet Martin McGuinness, the Northern Commander of the IRA. It was late summer 1981 and Ryan had returned to Dublin with a special request from Colonel Gaddafi. You see, Gaddafi was putting together a special task force. This special task force required special skills and those could only be provided by one man, the very man that McGuinness was going to introduce Ryan to, Eamonn McGuire. McGuire was an aircraft engineer for Aer Lingus, but his real true passion was Irish republicanism, and he worked for the IRA designing ever more sophisticated instruments of death.

Bombs, land mines and rockets. McGuire was to travel to Libya to train the Libyan special forces in the use of explosives. The CIA would describe McGuire as the IR, as chief technical officer, and McGuire would brag that the Americans would say I killed more than anyone else. I would accept that the Libyans had set up a camp in the desert and McGuire was brought out on a two week excursion paid for by the Libyan dictatorship to train Libyan special forces in the use of sophisticated explosives.

In the early 1980s, tensions were rising between Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and the newly elected President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan. Reagan saw Gaddafi and his support for terrorism as being a front for Soviet power. Gaddafi saw Reagan as being a cowboy imperialist. As tensions rose, neither side were going to back down. the United States of America ordered all of its citizens to leave Libya. In the Mediterranean, US ships would find themselves being shadowed by Libyan jet fighters and on the 20th of August 1981, two Libyan jet fighters were shot down by American pilots.

the United States of America started encouraging its allies to place a trade embargo on Gaddafi's Libya, but one of Ireland's biggest exports at the time was beef, and one of their fastest growing markets was Libya. As US businessmen were pulling out of Libya, the sale of Irish beef became the perfect cover story to justify why an Irishman would be hanging around in Tripoli. After the two week training camp, Patrick Ryan stayed behind in Tripoli. You see, the IRA was starting to have a bit of a problem. The more attacks they carried out, the more memo timers and electronic switches they got through, the more they needed to procure these things.

And that became a major problem. By 1981, the IRA had completely run out of electronic circuits with which to use to detonate IRA bombs. Without a regular supply. The campaign of bombing would come to an end. But even though the US was cutting its ties with Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, the UK wasn't. There were still plenty of British officials in Tripoli. Ryan made a point of observing these British officials, seeing who of them he could maybe get close to, who of them he could maybe befriend, who would question his story. He's just a humble beef salesman living in Tripoli. Why would that raise any suspicion with anyone? His time as a Catholic priest had taught him a great deal about human psychology, about what people want, about how to observe people, how to maybe coax out one more confession from someone who feels burdened by guilt or frustrated or unrecognised.

And it was whilst in Tripoli that Ryan befriended an Englishman and that Englishman happened to work in the electronics department of the British military. Ryan had to figure out what this Englishman wanted. What was it that this Englishman craved? What was it that this Englishman lacked in his day-to-day life that motivated him? And so Ryan, instead of pushing, instead of asking straight up, just sat back, allowed their relationship to develop and allowed the moment where the Englishman would reveal his deepest yearnings to Father Patrick Ryan. You see, what this Englishman craved was recognition, was status.

He was frustrated by his middling position. What he craved was the opportunity to maybe ingratiate himself with Colonel Gaddafi. A picture, a handshake, something to elevate his status. And this Englishman suspected that Father Patrick Ryan could be just the man to make the introduction. So what Ryan did was he concocted A fictional story about how Colonel Gaddafi was looking for someone who could procure electronic switches of a particular make and model needed for his radio sets, and that Gaddafi would be incredibly grateful to anyone who could procure such switches for him. A week later, the Englishman handed Ryan a folder full of documentation showing countries where military hardware could be procured and where it was easiest to get such weapons. Ryan mentioned to the Englishman two types of switches that Colonel Gaddafi was allegedly particularly interested in, and the Englishman arranged to meet with Patrick Ryan in Paris to hand over the switches.

These tiny switches would be a huge significant to the IRA. They would lead to so many of the most appalling atrocities in all of the terrible story of the Troubles. And all of this because of the gullibility of one frustrated, self aggrandizing Englishman. The little girl pressed her nose against the nursery window. She wanted to see her father. It was a July morning in 1982. Four year old Sarah Jane Young was looking for Lance Corporal Jeffrey Young.

It was a very important day for Jeffrey Young. He was participating in a ritual that delights tourists and locals alike. The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace At 10:28 AM on the 20th of July 1982, a new guard would leave Hyde Park Barracks, ride their majestic horses to Buckingham Palace to play out this 300 year old ritual. As the procession made its way down South Carriage Dr. it would pass a series of parked cars.

Among them would be a blue Morris Marion registration plate LMD 657-P and placed inside that car a remote controlled bomb, 25 lbs of Franjacks, a commercial explosive plus a large number of four and six inch nails and packed into the car, placed specifically on the side of the car facing towards the street. The purpose was to increase the likelihood of causing as much death and injury and misery possible. The bomb was set to detonate by remote control.

The IRA were watching just before the troops rode their horses past the bomb. A woman was pushing a pram just in front of the bomb itself. This did not deter the IRA for one second. Roy Bright, 36, Denis Daly, 23. Simon Tipper, 19 and the father of Sarah Jane Young. Lance Corporal Jeffrey Young, 19, would all be killed in the Hyde Park bomb. The woman pushing the pram would be badly injured, but her baby would miraculously survive unhurt. But the IRA was not done that day. In Regent's Park, a bomb was placed under a bandstand. Time to go off exactly as a British military band was performing a concert for tourists and locals alike. The device exploded as 30 bands men performed, 7 soldiers were killed, Graham Barker, 36, John Heritage, 29, Robert Livingston 31, George Missouri 19, John McKnight, 30, Keith John Powell 24 and Lawrence Smith 19.

A massive investigation would be launched and lodged in the grass of Hyde Park was found a fragment of a circuit board that matched the exact same make and model that Patrick Ryan had bought from the Englishman. Back in Dublin yet again to meet with Martin McGuinness, Ryan had a very angry meeting over a recent debacle that had taken place in Paris when the Hyde Park bomb had detonated. Ryan had been in Paris. Ryan was to assist a man whose nom de guerre was duty man.

The objective was to ingratiate him with Ryan's Libyan contacts in the hope of duty man getting a visa to visit Tripoli. Ryan met duty man in Paris. They were cordial. They talked about everything other than politics. Ryan had learned that to understand Summer's intentions and motivations, you must not press them. You must simply give them time to talk. Eventually they will reveal themselves to you. Brian went to dinner with Duty Man and his Libyan contacts in Paris, and he was. While at dinner, something shocking happened. Duty Man began to speak, to reveal his intentions, to talk about the one subject that neither the Libyans and certainly not Ryan himself wanted to hear about. This man was an official representative of Sinn Fein and the IRA, and he was talking about the one thing that Ryan had committed his life in the republican movement to opposing. Duty man was talking the unthinkable. He was talking about peace.

This outlined a change in direction for the leadership of Sinn Fein and the IRA. The Libyans and Ryan sat at the table as this representative of the IRA spoke at great length of the need for peace. It was a source of tremendous awkwardness. The Libyans ended the dinner abruptly, took Ryan to his side and said, Do not bring that man ever to meet US ever again. A rift was beginning to form in the senior leadership of the Republican movement between those who wanted peace and those who wish to continue the armed struggle, and Ryan knew exactly which side he was on in that rift. In the meeting with McGuinness, Ryan was accused of hijacking the introduction of duty man to the Libyan officials of costing Duty Man a visa to visit Tripoli. Ryan was furious, furious with the direction that McGuinness was pushing the IRA in and furious at having his integrity questioned.

He believed that in that meeting, Ryan was being pushed to leave the Republican movement and to end his association with the IRA. Patrick Ryan returned to Benidorm to rest, but the Libyans had a mission for him. The Libyans wanted Ryan to travel to Sicily. They had set up a cover story for him. Libyan intelligence had set up a small shop near a Catholic Church close to a naval base and him being a Catholic priest, it would give him the perfect excuse to travel up to the church every morning overlooking the naval base where he could observe the coming and going of US submarines.

Ryan travelled to Italy via Germany in a hope of throwing off anyone who was following him, but as soon as he landed in Italy he was immediately arrested by Italian police. Ryan's involvement with the Libyans had now come to an end. He was too compromised, too high profile and he was also now on the outs with the leadership of the IRA. He was at a crossroads in his life. He couldn't give up his commitment not just to Irish republicanism, but to, as he saw it, the only true expression of Irish republicanism, which was the use of force, the use of violence, the expulsion through force of arms of the British from Northern Ireland. That was something that had defined his life for years and it was something that he couldn't easily give up on. So he decided that he would commit himself to gathering intelligence for potential IRA attacks of his own volition and then would volunteer that information to the IRA. On the 6th of March 1988 in Gibraltar, a small British territory on the southern tip of Spain, 3 unarmed IRA members was shot dead by British security services, Sean Savage, 23, Daniel McCann 30 and Maureed Farrell 31. On the 20th of February 1988, Siobhan O'hanlon, an IRA member, was observed by the Spanish intelligence services crossing into Gibraltar.

The IRA team were there to carry out a Hyde Park style attack on British troops during the changing of the Guard ceremony. After O'hanlon had crossed back into Spain, she realized that she was being followed so she passed her information on to McCann and then left the operation and returned to Northern Ireland. When McCann, Savage and Farrell crossed into Gibraltar on the 6th of March, all three were being watched. This would lead to the awful events of the 8th of March where they tragically would be gunned down despite the fact that they were unarmed.

Patrick Bryan was not surprised by this. He was starting to come to the conclusion that the IRA was too penetrated. The sophisticated operations would be too difficult for them to carry out from now on and Ryan himself knew that he too was being observed. He was shuttling around Europe trying to find out ways to help the IRA, but the net was closing around him. His next destination was to be Brussels, but as he was about to board a bus in Benidorm, he was tapped on the shoulder by a youngish man who simply said to him in Spanish, are you getting on that bus? And walked away.

He took this as a warning from the Spanish intelligence service. For what did the warning mean? Were they telling him not to go or were they telling him not to come back? As soon as Ryan arrived in Brussels, he was aware that he was being watched and on the 30th of June 1988, Ryan was arrested by Belgian police. They found on his person information about how to assemble bombs and a large amount of cash. The Belgian authorities thought that Ryan's presence in Belgium might indicate the intention of the IRA to carry out an attack to coincide with Queen Elizabeth's visit to the Netherlands. Queen Elizabeth was marking the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, the ascent to the throne of William of Orange, the Prince of the Netherlands.

That led to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which is to this day one of the most important days in the Ulster Protestant calendar, and led to the creation of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the establishment of Protestant rule over Ireland. But the Belgian authorities had acted without consulting with their British counterparts. The British had only asked the Belgians to observe Patrick Ryan, not to arrest him. And the Belgians didn't find enough evidence on Ryan to be able to link him directly with any particular criminal offence. So there was a danger that Ryan could simply be released. So the British government decided to press the Belgian government to extradite Ryan to the UK. Back in Ireland, the somewhat ironically named Father Patrick Ryan's Justice Committee was set up to prevent the extradition of Patrick Ryan to the UK, and it was made clear to Belgian authorities that if Ryan was handed over to the British that this may incur the wrath of Catholics the world over to prevent himself from being extradited to the UK. What Ryan did was he went on a hunger strike. But there was a twist.

On the 13th day of Ryan's hunger strike, the Belgian Commission for Refugees rejected his claim for political asylum, but also rejected the UK's claim for extradition and instead said that Ryan would be deported to the Irish Republic. This caused fury amongst the British security services and political establishment. The plane that was carrying Ryan left Brussels at 8:55 PM and landed at 11:00 PM, where Ryan was greeted by large numbers of his ecstatic supporters, but the British had one card left to play.

The British decided to lodge an official extradition request for Father Patrick Ryan with the Irish government. Barney Lavery, 67, and his 13 year old granddaughter Emma Donnelly, both Irish, both Roman Catholic, were on their way home after dropping off an elderly neighbor after a bingo night on the 23rd of November 1988. As they drove past a local IUC police station there was a van parked outside of it. The van was packed full of explosives as they drove by.

The IRA detonated the bomb. The car that Lavery and his granddaughter were driving in was blown off the road. It took 40 minutes for the rescue team just to find the charge remains of their vehicle and what was left. 67 year old Barney and 13 year old Emma. So damaged, so destroyed, so forceful was the impact of the IRA explosion that the car had been crushed, almost as if it had been put into a compacting machine. Barney Lavery and Emma Donnelly, with the 22nd and 23rd civilians accidentally killed by the IRA in 1988 alone. Catholics and Protestants, men and women, children, parents, young and old and all of them dismissed. In the minds of the IRA, the only people responsible for the death of 13 year old Emma Donnelly was Emma Donnelly. Martin McGuinness expressly said that people who die in IRA Bonds are in the wrong place at the wrong time and it's their fault. It's not the fault of the IRA, it's not the fault of the people who packed a van full of explosives on the side of a St. No, it's Barney Lavery and Emma Donnelly's fault. They, and they alone are to blame, as Mr. McGuinness would have you believe.

As he stated at the time, on the 25th of November, the people of the village of Ben Burb turned out to attend the funerals of Barney Lavery and Emma Donnelly. The Archbishop of Armagh, a man who'd known Lavery since they'd studied at school together, said that the IRA's excuses are hollow, bordering on obscene. But in Dublin on that very same day, Father Patrick Ryan, a man who had made so many atrocities that had claimed the lives of so many people, possible for his actions due to his efforts procuring sophisticated weaponry for the IRA, he was recovering from his hunger strike in a clinic.

No Irish police operation had been launched to keep him under surveillance, and Sir Ryan simply signed himself out of the clinic and went to ground in the British Parliament. Margaret Thatcher was furious. She took questions from angry MPs about the Irish government's failure to detain Father Patrick Ryan. During one of these exchanges, Ryan was described by an MP as one of Ireland's most wanted terrorists, a claim that Margaret Thatcher did not disassociate herself from a mistake that she would come to regret. On the 13th of December, the Attorney General of the Irish Republic declined the UK's request for the extradition of Patrick Ryan.

The Attorney General stated that comments made in the House of Parliament would prejudice any jury against Father Patrick Ryan and make it therefore impossible for Patrick Ryan to have a fair trial in a British courtroom. Back in Tipperary, Patrick Ryan was gleeful. He'd got away with it. He'd slipped the net yet again. In June 1989, Ryan was still a wanted man in the UK and subject to a red Interpol warning, meaning that he would be detained if he travelled to any country outside of Ireland. But Ryan came up with a bold plan. He decided to run as a candidate in the 1989 European elections. He held a press conference in full clerical dress announcing that he was running as an independent candidate on an anti extradition platform.

He was the first priest to contest an election in the Irish Republic and this was something the Catholic Church was not happy about at all. Ryan ultimately failed to win election to the European Parliament, but back in the UK, the British made a stunning breakthrough. The IRA had buried a large cache of timers and other equipment in the Salshi forests in Northamptonshire. 2 IRA men had accidentally given the location away, and when the British dug up the timers they found that each timer was set to 24 days.

When the timers were forensically examined, the police found that they were the exact same make and model as the time is used in the Brighton and Hyde Park bombings. The British police worked back through the hotel guest register of the Grand Brighton, the hotel where the IRA had tried to kill the entire British government, checking for everyone who had checked in for 20 to 30 days before the bombing. And they had also found the switch devices used in the bomb were exactly the same ones the father, Patrick Ryan, had procured for the IRA. They were able to identify one guest who checked in under the name Roy Walsh and they were able to cross reference the card that he signed to check into his room against fingerprint registers for IRA suspects in Northern Ireland and England. And it brought up one match.

Patrick McGee in 1986. Patrick McGee would be convicted of the Brighton bombing in June 1989. A documentary broadcast in Ireland links Ryan with the Brighton and Hyde Park bombings. The documentary broadcast evidence that stated that the exact batch of switches used in the bombing matched exactly those purchased by the Englishman for Patrick Ryan. For a while, it even seemed that Ryan might stand trial in the Irish Republic. 4 witnesses came forward claiming that they were willing to give testimony and evidence in a trial against Patrick Ryan.

But one by one, each of those witnesses withdrew. The reason? They feared that if they gave evidence at such a prominent figure who had helped the Irish republican movement that they would be in danger. In 1990, Patrick Ryan was finally dismissed from the Palatine Order. By this point, Patrick Ryan didn't care. He had long lost any interest in being a Catholic priest. As the 90s progressed and Northern Ireland moved towards peace, Patrick Ryan became increasingly disillusioned, not with the awful cost of the Troubles, but that the republican movement was giving up on violence. In April 1994, he was convicted of handling stolen property in Ireland.

By that point, Ryan was a peripheral figure in Irish society, living on the margins, dabbling on some small scale in organized crime, disillusioned that the armed struggle hadn't brought about the unification of Ireland. Patrick Ryan passed away on the 15th of June 2025 at the age of 95. When he was interviewed by his biographer Jennifer O'Leary, she asked him do you have any regrets? And he said, the only regret I have is that I wasn't more effective, that the bombs made with the components I supplied didn't kill more people.

That is my one regret. Patrick Ryan contributed to dozens of bombs that killed hundreds of people, that tore families apart, that tore communities apart, that made widows and orphans, that tore a hole in the lives of families whose sons and daughters, brothers, friends, colleagues, husbands and wives had their lives cut short. And he didn't feel a single moment of regret, remorse or sorrow. His only regret is that he wished that he could have killed even more people.

My name is Joseph Parkinson. This has been Ancient to Recent. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Friday and are available on Apple Podcast, Spotify and YouTube.