Book review: The Padre is a frightening book on the priest who armed the IRA

Padre pays for sins of parent

Fr Patrick Ryan outside his family home, he is the subject of 'The Padre' 

This well-written, well-researched, and frightening book deserves a place in that bulging library where the memoirs of a myriad secondary figures in Ireland’s struggles gather dust.

Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound from 1936 and Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland, published 74 years ago, are primary examples even if the keepers of those men’s legacies might buck at the suggestion that either was secondary in any way. Yet they were.

They carried out decisions made by others and facilitated objectives agreed at one high consistory or another where they were not decisive voices. They, just like the former Pallottine from Tipperary Patrick Ryan, delivered rather than decided.

Jennifer O’Leary’s The Padre, unsurprisingly, shares another trait with many of the memoirs offered by participants in our cycle of insurrection after insurrection: It is unlikely to turn polarisation into understanding or encourage compromise for the common good.

Jennifer O’Leary author of 'The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money' 

Those who admire Ryan’s role as a pass-the-bomb fixer in the Provos’ 30-year reign of terror will have their beliefs, their visceral commitment to violent action, confirmed. However, the great majority of this island’s citizens will be nauseated by his role as a supplier of the materials used by Provos in scores if not hundreds of bomb attacks that killed bystanders as freely as targets. Most on this island will feel that old, unnerving shiver down the spine when the evil latent in our midst stirs itself one more time. It questions again, maybe unintentionally, the validity of trans-generational zealotry and the motives of those who inculcate hatreds in children.

That evil is given life by Ryan’s certainty in the justice of his means and cause, a certainty encouraged by his mother. She repeatedly described her role, as a 12-year-old, as standing sentry at the family’s remote north Tipperary safe house on watch for Black and Tan raiders.

Her pre-teen conversion to violent republicanism hardly stands as a mature, reliable decision but then neither did her son’s decision in his early teens to become a priest.

A decision motivated as much by social ambition as spirituality and one that meant less and less to him as his role as a bit player in three decades of terror deepened.

The Padre The True Story of the Irish Priest Who Armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money Jennifer O’Leary

The banality of that evil is, in The Padre, probably best represented by a figure other than Ryan. Éamon McGuire was, in 1981, an aviation engineer with Aer Lingus.

He was a Provo bomb maker and shared his knowledge with Gaddafi and the terror groups he supported. McGuire was described by the CIA as the IRA’s chief technical officer.

“The Americans would claim that I killed more than anyone else. I would accept that,” he conceded.

Those sentiments are echoed by Ryan: “My work for the IRA ... was effective. The only regret I have was that I wasn’t more effective; that the bombs made with components I supplied didn’t kill more. That is my one regret.” So utterly banal on the surface, so utterly toxic beneath.

• The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest Who Armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money by Jennifer O’Leary
• Merrion Press, pb €18.99