The man Dev first called a fool and then a great Irishman who always put his country first

I PRESUME when Ryle Dwyer denounces Frank Ryan’s November 1932 slogan ‘no free speech for traitors,’ in his review of a new Ryan biography by Adrian Hoar (Irish Examiner, April 9), it is not to the word ‘traitors’ he is objecting.

Indeed, in the Irish Examiner of April 17 last year, it was Ryle Dwyer who used the term ‘treacherous’ to describe the April 1932 conspiracy between the leaders of the Cumann na nGael opposition and the British government to try and bring down de Valera’s newly-elected government.

If he is objecting to its ‘no free speech’ component, he will also find that on the very day after it had been uttered, de Valera himself denounced Ryan on that account and, not for the first time, called him a fool.