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Republican priest Fr Patrick Ryan dies aged 95
A controversial republican priest who became the first Catholic cleric to contest an election in Ireland has died after a short illness.
Fr Patrick Ryan, who was a native of Rossmore, Co Tipperary, died in Dublin on Sunday aged 95.
Fr Ryan was ordained a priest in 1954 at the Pallottine College in Thurles. He later served in Tanzania and London. In January 1990, he was dismissed from the Pallottine Fathers. He no longer had permission to say Mass or administer the sacraments.
In 1988, Ryan was accused of involvement in Provisional IRA activity, and was the subject of two unsuccessful extradition requests. That year the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dubbed him 'a very dangerous man'.
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An election poster for the priest.
Ryan, dubbed The Padre, denied the accusation in an interview with The Tipperary Star, saying he had raised money both inside and outside Europe for victims on the nationalist side in the Troubles but had 'never bought explosives for the IRA or anybody else', and had never been requested by the paramilitary group to do so.
The priest allegedly became the main contact for many years between the IRA and one of its main sources of weaponry and finance – Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime. His meetings with Gaddafi were documented in journalist Jennifer O'Leary's book The Padre: The True story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddaffi's money.
Ryan was the first priest to contest an election in Ireland, when he ran in the 1989 European Parliament election in the Munster constituency as an Independent with Sinn Féin support. He failed to be elected but received over 30,000 votes.
In a 2019 interview with the BBC, Ryan was asked if he was involved in any of the incidents of which Ms Thatcher had accused him, to which he responded: 'I would say most of them. One way or another, yes I had a hand in most them – yes, she was right'.
