Provo priest Paddy Ryan hailed as 'servant of God' at funeral after death aged 95

Patrick 'Paddy' Ryan has died in Dublin aged 95.

His funeral was held at 11.30am today in The Church of Jesus Christ Our Saviour, Rossmore, Co Tipperary, overseen by four clerics.

There was mention of his hard rural upbringing, his skills at GAA, his enthusiasm for hunting, and his time spent as a missionary in Tanzania, east Africa in the early days of his church career.

There was no mention of his republican activities, which led to many deaths.

With a Bible placed upon his coffin, he was referred to throughout the service by the title “father” and was described as God’s “servant” and as “our brother”.

A funeral notice for him says he was mourned by “a large circle of friends in particular his comrades in Cashel, Co Tipperary”.

In a BBC Spotlight documentary in 2019, Ryan admitted publicly to his paramilitary crimes, then later elaborated upon them with journalist Jennifer O'Leary in her 2023 book The Padre.

During his missionary days, he had learned to fly to help deliver medicine to clinics, and Ms O'Leary wrote: "His technical ingenuity, honed in East Africa while drilling for water and learning to fly an aeroplane, came full circle when he re-engineered a simple parking timer for use in explosive devices, single-handedly increasing the IRA's ability to affect carnage in scores of bombings from the early 1970s onwards."

She added: "His diplomatic skills and manipulative ability quickly yielded results and he became one of the IRA's most significant intermediaries for money, as well as the main contact for many years between the IRA and one of its main sources of weaponry and finance - Colonel Gaddafi's Libyan regime…

"IRA bomb-makers carefully constructed increasingly sophisticated devices without ever knowing that a one-time priest, a so-called man of God, had sourced the key components that were used to maximum effect."

The book quotes him as saying: “'I set out to go around the world and discover the enemy of my enemy, the Brits, and make their enemy my friend.”

The Padre states that Ryan joined the junior seminary aged 14.

According to the New York Times, Ryan left his Pallottine religious order in 1973 after refusing a transfer to a parish church in England.

He had been accused of IRA involvement by the UK government in the late 1980s of links to terrorism after being caught at a safehouse in Belgium.

He was brought to the Republic of Ireland, but efforts to extradite him to the UK were unsuccessful.

When revealing his IRA past in the 2019 BBC documentary, Ryan had been asked if he really was involved in all the activities the government suspected him of.

"I'd say most of them, one way or the other, yes," he said.

"I had a hand in most of them, yes, she [Margaret Thatcher] was right."

He was asked if he had been involved in the Hyde Park bombing (four fatalities) and the Brighton bombing (five fatalities).

"Absolutely 100%. Oh yes," he said.

Did he have any regrets?

"Oh I have yes, big regrets," he replied.

"Of what nature? I regret that I wasn't even more effective, oh yes. Absolutely. I'd liked to have been much more effective than I actually was, but we didn't do too badly."

The dissident republican grouping Saoradh posted online: “From his work within the Irish Republican Army in fundraising and engineering, to his instrumental involvement in forging the historic Libya-Gaddafi connection, Fr Paddy was a key figure in a pivotal phase of the Irish revolutionary movement.

“We remember Fr Paddy Ryan with immense pride and deep respect. His legacy endures in the continued fight for a just and free Ireland.”