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20 Oct 2025

RTÉ to air series featuring controversial Tipperary priest and IRA operative this week

Scannal looks back, with the benefit of hindsight, on stories that shocked and gripped the nation

Tipperary Tipperary Tipperary

On June 18 this year, republicans from across Ireland gathered in Rossmore to pay a final farewell to Fr Patrick Ryan

Reporter:

Ryan Grace

02 Sept 2025 2:00 PM

A new series of RTÉ's social history series Scannal will begin on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 7pm on Tuesday September 2.
The series looks back, with the benefit of hindsight, on stories that shocked and gripped the nation.
Episode one will explore the double life of notorious Tipperary priest and IRA operative, Father Patrick Ryan.
Episode two looks back on the furore ignited by the Oireachtas Golfing Dinner in the summer of 2020.
Episode three will delve how the mysterious, unsolved, death of a young woman in 1852 continues to confound the experts, and finally, the series finale will question whether the biggest, costliest tribunal in the history of the State was worth it in the end.
Episode one will focus on the double life of notorious Tipperary priest and IRA operative, Fr Patrick Ryan. When the notorious Republican priest, known by many as The Padre, died in June 2025, tributes poured in from Republicans far and wide for a “true son of Ireland”.
But on the other side were his victims and their families whose lives had, quite literally, been blown apart by his actions.   
 
In this episode of Scannal, filmed before his death, reporter Garry Mac Donncha reflects on the remarkable double life of the Catholic priest who became a Republican arms dealer, bomber and military strategist – and the first cleric to run for election in Ireland. 
A native of Rossmore, Co Tipperary, Patrick Ryan was ordained in 1954 and served in Tanzania and London before eventually being dismissed from the Pallotine Fathers in 1990.
The revelation that the polyglot, well-liked and intelligent priest was also an IRA operative who had been secretly working with Colonel Gadaffi and his regime to ensure a flow of weapons from Libya to the IRA shocked many in the UK and Ireland.   
 
Labeled “a very dangerous man” by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Ryan denied supplying weapons to the IRA but admitted to raising funds for nationalists during the Troubles.
It later transpired that the priest had also been the mastermind behind the deadly IRA timed bombs of the 1980s, some of the bloodiest and most horrific killings of the IRA’s campaign of  violence.  
This episode of Scannal focusses on the British Government’s attempts, in 1988, to extradite Ryan for trial in the U.K.
The extradition case sparked a high-profile legal battle between Britain and Ireland and a fierce war of words between Margaret Thatcher and then Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey.
It was a case that would dominate headlines, spark large-scale protests and push Anglo-Irish relations to the brink.   

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