Desmond Ryan:  an appreciation

[Obituary notice by Desmond Greaves carried in the “Irish Democrat”, January 1965]

Desmond Ryan is dead. The breaking of links with the heroic past is always sad, but there is something especially wrong in this. He was 72 and passed away early in Christmas week after a long illness.

But that knowledge does not lessen the affront. And it is not because of the picture every schoolboy knows, of the scene in the Post Office where Desmond Ryan bends down to Connolly’s stretcher, Pearse by his side. In that picture Ryan has eternal youth. But it is no more than he deserved. Nobody could ever think of him as anything but young and so, though it happens all the time, there still seems something wrong. I hope the sod lies gently on him.

Desmond Ryan was born in Dulwich, London, in 1892.  His father was the famous W.P. Ryan, leading figure in the London Gaelic League and a considerable historian, journalist and Irish scholar whose “History of the Irish Labour Movement” is still read today.

In his autobiography,“Remembering Sion”, written at the onset of maturity when the emotional storms of 1916-23 had subsided, Desmond Ryan described in glowing terms his family’s return to Ireland, where his father undertook the editorship of the “Irish Peasant” centred in Navan. He was then twelve. He thus grew up with the growth of the Irish-Ireland movement, attended St Enda’s, and continued to live and teach there during his university days.

In his family surroundings he was more than fortunate. The best men in Ireland called at the home. A high level of culture combined with an atmosphere if not of scepticism, of intellectual independence. On one side of the family he was an Ulsterman, and recollections of the Fenians combined with those of the land struggles. He was an intellectual bred out of the experience of the Irish people.

His first and probably most enduring political experience came with the 1913 Transport lockout. This was largely to his father’s credit. W.P. Ryan threw himself into the support of Larkin. Only one pen could compare with his, as he provided Lapworth’s “Daily Herald” with the truth about the attempt of William Martin Murphy to starve out the workers of Dublin. That other one was of Francis Skeffington.

So naturally under these circumstances, where even the London Gaelic League took a political stand in favour of Larkin, the Ryans came into close contact with all the principal leaders of the Labour movement.

In years to come Desmond Ryan tested everybody of that period by his stand in 1913. “He was on the right side in 1913,” he would say, and that was the first item in his favour. This he would do right up to his last illness. And at St Enda’s he met all the principal Republicans and was in a position to apply this test. The signatories of the Proclamation passed it with flying colours. And so did many more. In those who didn’t Ryan, though incapable of rancour, had little interest. 

His next great experience was that of 1916. He had conceived an intense admiration for Patrick Pearse, and with Colm O’Loughlin and others used to spend holidays at Pearse’s cottage in Connemara. Diarmuid Lynch found it hard to believe that Pearse told so much of his plans to Ryan. He forgot, however, that Ryan was in 1916 not a pupil at the school but a student aged 23 and thus in no sense a child being moulded to the political purposes of a master. After the Rising he was imprisoned in Stafford, Fron Goch and Wormwood Scrubs.

The death of Pearse was a cruel blow. Something of the hero-worship Pearse evoked in his pupils comes out in Ryan’s little book,“A Man called Pearse” – a reference to Mahaffy’s supercilious reference to someone he was pretending he didn’t know.

Ryan was not, however, a man of action to be stirred to revenge, nor a politician to complete his leader’s work. He was a scholar and a writer. He worked for some time on the “Freeman’s Journal” and following the official policy of the Irish Labour Party, at the conclusion of the truce half-heartedly supported the Treaty.

At the same time he could appreciate those on the anti-Treaty side were true steel. Thus he spoke always of Cathal Brugha and Erskine Childers with deep regard, thinking Arthur Griffith’s attack on Childers unforgivable. His feelings are well expressed in his autobiography, whose nostalgic title with its Biblical overtones indicates the intensity of his emotions.

Perhaps it was thanks to the mental conflicts which must have been all but unbearable to one whose instinct was not to resolve them in action, that Ryan suffered a nervous breakdown. His father was ailing and doubted if he would ever complete the material he had collected for a life of James Connolly.

As much to occupy him as for any other reason, he handed it to his son, who was thus enabled to perform a work which places every student of Connolly in his debt. The basic source material for Connolly’s life was collected and published by Desmond Ryan, and every book about Connolly that has been written since has taken Desmond Ryan’s “Life of Connolly” as its starting-point.

Soon after its publication he settled once more in London where he remained throughout the ‘thirties, going back to Dublin in 1939. The ‘thirties were days of storm and ferment in Britain as elsewhere. Desmond Ryan associated himself with the “popular front” left, contributed to socialist newspapers and took the democratic stand towards war and Fascism which he had learned twenty years previously in the Larkinite unrest.

In the immediate period before the second World War England was agog with the “IRA bombings” and racialist elements were trying hard to stir up anti-Irish feeling as a means of splitting the anti- fascist front. Even solid trade union workers were beginning to be affected.

This was the period when the “popular front” publisher, Gollancz, issued Dorothy Macardle’s “Irish Republic” as a “Left Book Club” extra volume, and the campaign for the release of Frank Ryan from captivity in Spain engaged the entire left-wing movement.

Desmond Ryan was called on to rally the progressive forces round the defence of Ireland’s national demands and to explain that British imperialism was responsible for the IRA campaign which was directed against a real grievance. His pamphlet “Ireland, whose Ireland?”, published by Fore Publications – a subsidiary of Martin Lawrence, since merged into Lawrence and Wishart – had an immediate success, and is indeed an extremely brilliant exposition of the Irish question and the British people. 

In his introductory chapter he defined the Irish question as simply as this – the Irish question is “whose Ireland?” (Ireland’s or Britain’s?). In his historical summaries he showed how far away he was from the “Treaty” position. He had indeed been enormously impressed by De Valera’s achievements in the ‘thirties. He drew heavily on Connolly and Larkin and occupied a political position not far from that of the Republican Congress, which he mentioned favourably in the pamphlet. 

But though the Republican Congress had split the IRA – most people now believe mistakenly – his treatment of Sean Russell was calm and friendly. Particularly noteworthy was the reference to solidarity actions by the British people who, in Wales particularly, protested against the 1916 executions and stood up for Ireland against their masters more than once.

It was during this period that Desmond Ryan contributed to the “Irish Democrat”, then published under the earlier title of “Irish Freedom”.

His study of De Valera was published before he left England for Dublin at the outbreak of war. For the next few years he devoted himself to historical writing and was able to produce his “Phoenix Flame”, a brilliant study of the period from the Phoenix Conspiracy to the Fenian Rising, and most important of all “The Rising”, which will long remain the standard work on 1916.

During his period of exile he translated Le Roux’s lives of Pearse and Tom Clarke. He considered them essential reading though fully aware of their deficiencies. “I have one rule,” he told me once. “and it is to find out what actually happened.”  Only afterwards could one estimate it. 

He would spend long hours laboriously unearthing the facts. Yet so little was he affected by “amour propre” that he would immediately provide others with the references he had so laboriously disinterred. He used to get impatient at the post-Treaty fashion of only publishing what was politically suitable but telling everybody the true facts privately. To him historical truth was sacrosanct. This quality appeared in all his works, despite their wide range from the story of St. Enda’s and the Gaelic Movement to a life of Sean Treacy. One of his most significant historical tasks was the editing of the Devoy papers in two magnificent volumes.

For many years he contributed to the “Irish Times”, “Irish Press” and other newspapers, reviews and historical articles which are a mine of information on the revolutionary period which was his speciality.

He embodied all that was most civilised in his generation, and we will not see his like for some time to come.

C.D.G