Clare native posthumously awarded prestigious humanitarian award

Mick (Michael ) Ryan, Global Deputy Chief, World Food Programme Engineering. Michael was a fatality in the Ethiopian Airline plane that crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing all on board.

A Clare native and engineer for the UN World Food Programme who died in a plane crash last year has been awarded the Irish Red Cross Humanitarian award for 2020.

Mick Ryan, who lived with his wife Naoise and their two children in Cork, was killed in an Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 last year. His flight from Addis Ababa went down minutes after take-off.

He had relocated to Rome before his death to work in the UN's Italian headquarters. He was due to turn 40 in the month he died.

Mr Ryan was posthumously appointed chief engineer of the UN World Food programme following the crash.

Saved hundreds of lives

In the aftermath of his death the UN said that Mr Ryan saved hundreds of lives arising out of his extraordinary intellect and his relentless work ethic.

Michael worked tirelessly for populations in difficulty abroad. He used his engineering skills to establish roads or connections between areas that were in trouble arising out of flooding or war.

Mr Ryan was named the Humanitarian of the Year  having been nominated alongside Aubrey McCarthy of Tiglin and Avril Patterson of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The awards ceremony was held virtually.

Naoise Connolly accepted the award on behalf of her late husband who had dedicated his life to humanitarian work overseas.

This award means so much to us and my only regret is that Mick isn’t here to accept it himself, I know he would be so humbled by it. To me it’s recognition of the person that he was, he was a humanitarian in every sense of the word

"Mick believed that engineering was about people and people were at the heart of everything that he did. From the time we met at college he really believed he could make a difference in the world and he had the skills and talent to make that happen.

"But really, the reason that Mick was able to achieve all that he did was because he was intuitive about people, he was able to motivate them and have them share his enthusiasm and he did it all with such fun and laughter."

Plane tragedy

The Irish deputy chief engineer with the United Nations World Food Programme was one of 157 passengers from more than 30 countries on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight which crashed minutes after take-off en route from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Nairobi in Kenya.

The aircraft was a Boeing 737 Max. Aviation regulators grounded this aircraft model after the crash. It was the second Boeing 737 Max aircraft to crash in the space of four months.