A Bible in one hand and a bomb in the other, unrepentant Provo priest Fr Paddy Ryan died with blood on his hands
It is not often I find myself in agreement with the ‘Belfast Telegraph’! I am most certainly in agreement with this headline.
I would add the words ‘and went to hell’ after the word ‘died’!
Evil and all as this man was generally perceived to be, that view did not impact upon the Roman Catholic priests who officiated at this funeral!
I would encourage readers to have a listen to a sermon I preached in 1987, exposing the same spirit as that manifested at the funeral of Paddy Ryan.
Message for Protestants from the funeral sermons of priests
This was the headline in the ‘Belfast Newsletter’ of June 18th.
Provo priest Paddy Ryan hailed as ‘servant of God’ at funeral after death aged 95
The headline highlights how that Romanism has not changed and in truth saw no evil in the activities of the IRA and their agents such as Ryan!
Pope John Paul II, on a visit to Ireland back in 1979, said: ‘Murder is murder is murder’.
As all popes before him he was a lying hypocrite and the burying of Paddy Ryan underscores that. There were no ‘specifics’ in the Pope’s 1979 statement. It was the media pundits who told the world that he was speaking to the IRA!
If he was, and I don’t believe he was, it did not reach the ears of the priests at Paddy Ryan’s funeral.
The ‘Belfast Newsletter’ report said:
‘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 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.”
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.”
This was the man that four priests of Rome buried as ‘God’s servant and as our brother’.
They thus tie themselves into and endorse the activities of this murdering terrorist. They also indicate the approval of the whole Roman Catholic Church, for this was an official rite of that body.
It altogether supports the condemnation of Rome and the historic criticisms directed against it by Bible-believing Protestants.
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)
Saturday 21st June 2025