Priest who admitted role in IRA bombings and arms dealing dies aged 95

Belfast Telegraph

16-06-2025

Fr Patrick Ryan had been accused of involvement in Provisional IRA activity in 1988 and had been the subject of two unsuccessful extradition attempts at a time when Mrs Thatcher called him 'a very dangerous man'.
Fr Ryan, who was a native of Rossmore, Co Tipperary, died in Dublin on Sunday at the age of 95 following a short illness.
He had been ordained as a priest in 1954 at the Pallottine College in Thurles and later served in Tanzania and London.
In January 1990, he was dismissed from the Pallottine Fathers. He no longer had permission to say Mass or administer the sacraments.
Becoming known as 'The Padre', he spent decades denying accusations, claiming he had raised money both inside and outside Europe for victims on the nationalist side in the Troubles but had 'never bought explosives for the IRA or anybody else' and had never been requested by the paramilitary group to do so.
But the priest had allegedly become the main contact for many years between the IRA and one of its main sources of weaponry and finance — Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime. His meetings with Gaddafi were documented in journalist Jennifer O'Leary's book The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest Who Armed the IRA with Gaddafi's Money.
Ryan was also the first priest to contest an election in Ireland, when he ran in the 1989 European Parliament election in the Munster constituency as an Independent with Sinn Fein support. He failed to be elected but received more than 30,000 votes.
But it was his alleged role in supplying arms for the IRA that brought him under most scrutiny and caused a political storm between the UK, Belgium and the Republic of Ireland.
He had been arrested in Belgium in 1988. Following the killing of three off-duty British servicemen in the Netherlands, a tip-off led Belgian police to an IRA sympathiser's home and to Ryan's arrest. He was believed to be the quartermaster of an active IRA unit in Belgium, a crucial logistical figure. Bomb-making equipment, manuals and a large sum of foreign currency were seized.
Repatriated to Ireland, after going on hunger strike as the UK sought to bring him to trial, the country then refused to extradite him to the UK believing he would not receive a fair trial.
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Mrs Thatcher once described the cleric as having an 'expert knowledge of bombing' and, in 2019, in an interview for BBC's Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History, he was asked if he was involved in any of the incidents of which Mrs Thatcher had accused him, to which he responded: 'I would say most of them. One way or another, yes, I had a hand in most of them. Yes, she was right.'
Asked if the PM was right to connect him to events such as the Brighton bomb, he replied: 'One hundred per cent.'
Five people died when, on October 12, 1984, an IRA bomb exploded inside the Grand Hotel, where Margaret Thatcher's ruling Conservative Party was holding its annual conference.
As the programme explored his key role in IRA arms shipments from Libya, he went on to take credit for introducing the organisation to a type of timer unit it used to set off bombs which he had discovered while in Switzerland.
Asked if he had any regrets, Mr Ryan said: 'I regret that I wasn't even more effective, absolutely. I would have liked to have been much more effective, but we didn't do too badly.'