Biography: A new biography Frank Ryan, republican socialist and spellbinding figure written by Adrian Hoar is reviewed by Cathal O'Shannon.
Cathal O'Shannon
In the year the second World War began, a huge poster was spread across a railway bridge spanning the North Strand, not far from where I spent my boyhood. In big black letters it demanded: "Release Frank Ryan - or Else!" It had a particular meaning for me, because a couple of years earlier I had been taken by my father to a meeting in a little hall in town to hear Frank Ryan, wounded in the Spanish Civil War, speak of the horrors of Franco's efforts to smother the Republic and the gallant efforts of the International Brigades to defend it.
A spellbinding figure, his wounded arm in a sling, he was to go back a month later to the Spanish war, to capture and imprisonment, and eventual death in Nazi Germany in mid-1944. Frank Ryan, an IRA activist during the Irish Civil War, a joint editor of An Phoblacht and a leader of Saor Éire and the Republican Congress after he had parted from the 1930s IRA, was arguably the most significant - and certainly the most attractive - of the radical republican socialists bred in the aftermath of the birth of the Irish Free State.
A lot has been written about this man, but until now Sean Cronin's 1980 book Frank Ryan: The Search for the Republic, has been the standard work. Inevitably Adrian Hoar's new biography benefits from more recent scholarship and deals in more detail with Frank Ryan's life in Ireland before Spain and Germany than Cronin's. Inevitably, however, it will bring up once more the whole rationale of Ryan's time in Germany and what he might have done to aid Germany's war effort against the democracy for which he had fought in Spain.
Frank Ryan was captured by Italian troops in March, 1938, imprisoned and sentenced to death by Franco. Agitation in Ireland and elsewhere led instead to a sentence of 30 years. Hence the huge poster asking for his release I mentioned earlier.
Hoar tells once more of the machinations of Ireland's ambassador to Spain, Leopold Kerney, and the German Abwehr, which led to the springing of Ryan from prison in Burgos and his transfer to his ultimate destination, Berlin. Like Cronin he has had access to the records of Helmut Clissmann, the Abwehr operative and soldier who had known Ryan when he was an exchange student in Ireland before the war, and Francis Stuart.
How did a republican socialist like Ryan, who had fought fascism in Spain, ease his conscience enough to allow himself live high on the hog, with diplomatic rations, in the capital of Nazism? His role was to advise, when asked, on matters relating to Ireland's neutrality, de Valera's attitudes to Britain and the US and the possible usefulness of the IRA in the reunification of Ireland. Did this amount to collaboration, as some writers have plainly suggested?
Years ago when I made a film with Irish survivors of the Spanish Civil War, there was plain unease among a few of them at Ryan's sojourn in Germany, though they wouldn't express it publicly. Hoar deals with this charge a little uneasily himself, and comes to the conclusion I came to many years ago. Frank Ryan was not a collaborator in the sense that he helped the Germans to fight a war against his erstwhile comrades, but kept faith in his anti-imperialist past.
He has no real answer as to why Ryan returned to Germany after the abortive attempt to land himself and former IRA chief of staff Sean Russell by German submarine off the Kerry coast, an act which I think must have haunted him for the rest of his brief life.
The tone of the book is of admiration for a man of heroic qualities, a man of courage but also of huge hatreds. A street brawler who led gangs to beat up Dubliners selling poppies on Armistice Days, Ryan was also a dedicated socialist and an inspiration to many of the men he led in Spain. His illness and sense of loneliness and frustration while he was in Germany are well captured in this sad portrait of the deterioration of a man of great worth whose reputation is still in the shadows.
Cathal O'Shannon is a former journalist and broadcaster. He wrote and presented the prizewinning TV documentary on the Irish in the Spanish Civil War, Even the Olives Are Bleeding.
In Red and Green: the Lives of Frank Ryan. By Adrian Hoar, Brandon, 288pp. €24.99