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.