Frank Ryan (Irish republican)

Frank Ryan (Proinsias Ó Riain; 11 September 1902 – 10 June 1944) was an Irish politician, journalist, intelligence agent and paramilitary activist.

He first came to prominence as an Irish republican activist at University College Dublin and fought for the Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War.

Ryan fell under the influence of Peadar O'Donnell, an advocate of socialism within Irish republicanism, which resulted in him breaking with the IRA and becoming involved with founding a new political organisation, the Republican Congress, and editing its associated newspaper, An Phoblacht.

Ryan participated in the Spanish Civil War on the Popular Front side, fighting for the Comintern-organised International Brigades (retroactively known as the Connolly Column).

After being captured by pro-Nationalist Italians, he was sentenced to death.

He left before graduating to join the IRA's East Limerick Brigade in 1922.

He fought on the Anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War, and was wounded and interned.

In November 1923 he was released and returned to University College Dublin.

He was active in several Irish-language societies, winning the Cumann Gaedhealach's gold medal for oratory in Irish in 1924.

During the Gaelic Revival era, he was commissioned to write for Irish-language publications – he briefly edited An Reult (The Star).

He formed the University Republican Club and led it on demonstrations before graduation in 1925.

After university, he taught Irish at Mountjoy School (a Protestant school in Dublin), but journalism was his vocation.

His day job was editing Irish Travel for the Tourist Board, while he also edited An tÓglach (The Volunteer) for the IRA.

Evenings were devoted to teaching Irish at Conradh na Gaeilge, lecturing in history and literature, and leading the occasional céilidh.

In 1926, he was appointed adjutant of the Dublin Brigade and given the job of reorganisation.

Ryan was always an anti-imperialist, and Peadar O'Donnell believes the biggest influence on Ryan's thinking in those days was the Congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels, which he attended with Domhnall O'Donoghue, both as delegates of the IRA, in February 1927.

Starting in 1928 and lasting until the mid-1930s, Ryan would enter into a romantic relationship with Rosamond "Róisín" Jacob, a fellow Republican and socialist.

The pair met through Ryan's Irish language classes.

Because of a number of factors, such as the age difference between the two (she was 40 and he was 26 when they met, at a time when the norm in Ireland was that women should be younger than their partners), their different religious backgrounds (Ryan was nominally a Catholic, Jacob nominally a Quaker) and the fact that they were unwed, the relationship was considered "an affair" and they believed that it had to be kept a secret.

In 1929, Ryan was appointed editor of the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht, where he worked alongside Geoffrey Coulter, his assistant.

Together they turned it into a lively political paper, boosting the readership substantially.

In this year he was elected to the Army Executive, a body one below the IRA Army Council.

In May 1930, Ryan spent several weeks in the US, addressing Irish conventions, where he witnessed the start of the Great Depression, and the ravages of unemployment.

In 1931, he was imprisoned for publishing seditious articles in An Phoblacht.

Later that year, he was again imprisoned for contempt of court.

Following the victory of Fianna Fáil in the 1932 Irish general election, Ryan was released from prison in March 1932 alongside thousands of other republican prisoners as part of a general amnesty.

In 1933, Ryan, along with George Gilmore and Peadar O'Donnell, proposed the establishment of a new left-republican organisation to be called the Republican Congress.

This would form the basis of a mass revolutionary movement appealing to the working class and small farmers.

At an IRA Army Convention, they narrowly failed to gain approval for the proposal.

When Ryan, Gilmore and O'Donnell held a meeting in Athlone that April that continued to push for the creation of the Congress, the IRA Army Council subsequently "court marshalled" all three of them, while IRA volunteers who supported the Congress were stood down.

In the aftermath, Gilmore, Ryan and O'Donnell pressed ahead with the Republican Congress, with Ryan becoming editor of its eponymous newspaper.

Ryan's close friend was the poet, Irish republican and left-wing political activist Charlie Donnelly who had formed a Republican Congress branch in London.

Donnelley sent articles concerning the situation in Britain for publication in the Irish Congress newspaper.

Ryan was released from prison in 1940 with the help of German authorities.

He then collaborated with Nazi Germany, believing a German invasion of Britain would be advantageous to the Irish nationalist cause.

Ryan was born in the townland of Bottomstown, Elton, County Limerick.

His parents, Vere Foster Ryan and Annie Slattery, were National School teachers at Bottomstown (parish of Knockainey) with a taste for Irish traditional music, and they lived in a house full of books.

He attended St. Colman's College, Fermoy.

From then on he was devoted to the restoration of the Irish language.

He studied Celtic Studies at University College Dublin, where he was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) training corps.