BETTY RYAN-O’GORMAN from Carlow has written seeking readers’ help on a matter arising from that Kevin Barry farewell letter: recently sold at auction and now happily – thanks to the unnamed buyer – bound for long-term loan to the National Library of Ireland.
Beginning “Dear Boys,” Barry’s letter was addressed to several friends, one of whom is identified only as “Paddy”. Betty’s question is whether anyone out there can confirm this was her father Paddy Ryan, who was a first-year medical student with Barry in UCD, shared his republican activism, and once told her that he had been among “the group of students who drew straws to go on the particular mission on which Kevin Barry was caught”.
Paddy Ryan did not speak much about his involvement in the old IRA, she adds. It was only through another of his passions – rugby – that he briefly opened up on the subject, some 50 years later, circa 1970. The occasion was the then-vexed debate about the GAA’s ban on members playing “foreign games”.
By now synonymous with rugby in Carlow, from his decades-long involvement with that town’s club, Ryan thought the ban “ridiculous” and cited Barry, a rugby-loving nationalist martyr, in his support.
When he expanded on this subject, his daughter first heard about her father’s friendship with the “lad of 18 summers” (as the song puts it, not quite correctly, since Barry was born in January and was two months short of his 19th birthday when he died).
“He sat beside him during lectures and went to his home for Sunday tea with Kevin and his mother. He also told me that he regretted burning all papers with Kevin’s name on them after he learned about his capture. He went back to his room in the Hall of Studies and burnt them as he was afraid of the soldiers coming to search the rooms of Kevin’s friends in UCD. He was very proud of the fact that Kevin played rugby . . .” After that one conversation, the matter was not broached again. When her father died in 1980, Betty also discovered he had been a dispatch rider for the IRA during the War of Independence. This intelligence was related by an aunt who had a dim view of her late brother’s “racing around the country on a motorbike – taking risks and wasting Papa’s money”.
The aunt might have had a point. Despite spending six years at UCD, Paddy never qualified in medicine. He failed his finals and didn’t repeat. But, as he told his daughter, he never wanted to be a doctor anyway, the choice being that of his father – himself a medical man, of whom more anon.
So Paddy first became a journalist instead (the shame!), editing the Carlow Nationalistfor a time. He then joined the sugar company in Carlow, where he worked until retirement. If anything, his apprenticeship as a dispatch rider may have borne more fruit than his medical studies: among the memorabilia he left was a medal won at the Isle of Man TT races.
NOW 74,Betty is anxious to find out what she still can about her father's involvement during Ireland's revolutionary period, not just for herself but for her sons: who, as she jokes, are "afraid I might snuff it before imparting all I know about their interesting ancestors".
There are interesting ancestors on both sides of the family, in fact, although the contrast is striking. Her mother was Protestant, of northern Presbyterian and Plymouth Brethren stock. She liked to have pictures of British royalty on her wall and loved the people of the England, where she had worked for a time.
Moreover, as a nurse, she “hated violence”. Not surprisingly, Ireland’s independence struggle was an awkward conversation topic for both parties in the marriage. Maybe that explains Paddy’s later silence.
But if it was he who is mentioned in Kevin Barry’s letter, it was not the first time the Ryan family had brushed shoulders with a nationalist icon. Betty also writes that a generation earlier, in 1890, Paddy’s father – Dr Valentine Ryan – was one of the medics who tended Charles Stewart Parnell after he had quicklime thrown in his eyes during the infamous election rally at Castlecomer.
Such was the bitterness of the time that opponents later claimed Parnell had been struck only by flour and that, by making subsequent appearances with bandaged eye, he was exploiting public sympathy. But contemporary news reports speak of an unnamed local doctor in Castlecomer who dabbed the caked lime out of Parnell’s eyes with “a stain handkerchief and some hair-oil”, while apologising for the pain this caused, and calming Parnell’s fears that he might lose his sight.
Betty suggests that Dr Ryan became involved in the affair through his brother, Fr PJ Ryan, a friend of Parnell and the first secretary of the Land League in Carlow. Another man, she adds, who was not encouraged to talk about the events. The Parnellite activism was frowned on by his superiors and he was later “silenced” and “sent to Belgium”.
Anyone with information about Paddy Ryan is asked to contact Betty by post c/o The Beams Restaurant, 59 Dublin Street, Carlow or by e-mail to the.beams@ireland.com.