Eoin Ryan who died on December 14th aged 81, was a long-time liberal voice in the inner circles of Fianna Fβil until he became alienated from the leadership of Charles Haughey especially on Northern Ireland policy. He also managed to combine a career in the Seanad over three decades with practising at the Bar and being an influential presence in the boardrooms of high-profile companies.
Politics was in his blood. His father, Dr James Ryan, was a founding member of Fianna Fβil and a minister for most of his 30 years in the Dβil but Eoin Ryan seemed reluctant to plunge full time into political life and preferred to advance his views in the Seanad and in the governing bodies of the party where he served for many years on the National Executive and as a vice-president.
The split with the Haughey leadership in the early 1980s was a difficult time for him and led to an unsuccessful covert campaign within the party to deprive him of his seat in the Seanad where he had been the party leader under Jack Lynch as Taoiseach.
In Ireland's commercial life, he will always be associated with the New Ireland Assurance Company of which he was chairman for many years. Other companies of which he was a director at various times included the Smurfit group, Lyons Irish Holdings, the Ulster Investment Bank, P V Doyle Hotels, the Smith Group and Aran Energy. He was also a governor of the Central Bank after retirement from politics.
He was an ardent supporter of Ireland playing a full role in European affairs and represented the country in the Council of Europe in the 1960s. He was also active in the Irish Council of the European Movement and was chairman in the crucial pre-EEC entry years of 1971-'73.
Eoin Ryan was born in Dublin on June 12th, 1920, at a time when his father and mother were actively engaged in the War of Independence. Dr Ryan had attended to James Connolly in the GPO in 1916 when he was a medical student and his future wife, Mair∅n Creegan, who was a noted writer of children's stories in Irish, also held a 1916 service medal.
Eoin Ryan was educated at Presentation College, Bray, and at Mount St Joseph's College, Roscrea, where he appreciated the fact that both rugby and hurling were played.
He joined the Defence Forces during the Emergency years and rose to the rank of captain in the Army during 1940-'43. Later, he resumed his studies at UCD where he was awarded a BA in economics and the Diploma in Public Administration. Following studies at the King's Inns, he was called to the Bar in 1945. He was also in close contact with contemporary politics through his father who had served continuously in Fianna Fβil Cabinets under Eamon de Valera since the first one in 1932. A more informal contact was with a future Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, who used to play poker with Dr Ryan in Eoin Ryan's Dublin flat.
He joined Fianna Fβil but found the local cumann not very inspiring and formed a new one with friends from UCD and business, in the Dublin constituency of Sean Lemass. He was soon elected to the National Executive. Following Fianna Fβil's loss of power in the 1954 general election, Lemass asked a group of young party activists including Eoin Ryan to travel the country to re-invigorate the party at local level. They were not only to re-organise a demoralised party but also spread the Lemass economic doctrine based on Keynesian ideas of public expenditure to lift Ireland out of its depression. Others in the "modernising" group of Fianna Fβil "young Turks" included Charles Haughey, Brian Lenihan and George Colley. Lemass also put Eoin Ryan on a committee with Michael Yeats charged with coming up with new education policies. Noel Browne, the former Clann na Poblachta minister who had joined Fianna Fβil had inspired the setting up of this committee.
Fianna Fβil's return to power in 1957 also saw Eoin Ryan winning a Seanad seat on the Labour panel. He was to serve as a senator until 1987 having later switched to the Industrial and Commercial panel. For four of those years, 1965-'69, Dr Ryan was also a senator, having retired from the Dβil. Eoin Ryan once considered running for a Dβil seat but decided against it because it would have been "a full-time job".
At the New Ireland company where he became chairman in 1971, he played a leading role in resisting a takeover attempt by the rival PMPA of Joe Moore and in bringing in the French UAP company as a "white knight" with a substantial shareholding.
He was Director of Elections in 1977 when Fianna Fβil swept back into power in a landslide victory and was appointed leader of the party in the Seanad. He was noted in a conservative party for his liberal approach to the then controversial issues of contraception and divorce. He was also Director of Elections in 1981 when Fianna Fβil under Charles Haughey was ousted from power. Later that year he strongly criticised the new Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, for announcing a "crusade" against "sectarian" laws and any attempt to remove Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution which, Senator Ryan said, expressed "the unalterable aspiration of the great majority of the Irish people to the unity of Ireland."
In 1982 when the "heaves" against Haughey's leadership began, Eoin Ryan firmly aligned himself with the anti-Haughey faction and made headlines when he denounced his Taoiseach as "an electoral liability" at a meeting of the National Executive on the eve of a crucial motion of confidence vote. He called for Haughey's resignation before another vote of no confidence. He was easily re-elected to the Seanad in 1983 but was to pay for his outspokenness when he was replaced as leader of the Fianna Fβil group by Senator Michael Lanigan.
There was another clash with Haughey over the latter's interpretation of the report of the New Ireland Forum in May 1984 as saying that the "unitary state" was the only basis for a solution to the Northern Ireland problem. Senator Ryan publicly rejected this interpretation and called for a parliamentary party meeting to thrash out the differing views.
The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement the following year increased the distance between Eoin Ryan and the official Fianna Fβil stance as laid down by Haughey. He refused to vote for the Fianna Fβil amendment criticising the agreement in the Seanad. He did not see the agreement as incompatible with Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution.
Away from the storms of politics and the power struggles of the boardrooms, Eoin Ryan and his wife, Joan (nΘe Dowd) enjoyed poetry and the theatre. They had been friends of the poet, Patrick Kavanagh, and had supported him at his neediest periods. The poet's wedding reception was held in their Dublin home. Eoin Ryan also enjoyed golf and walking.
He is survived by his wife, Joan; his sons, James, Eoin and Mark and his daughter Derbhail. He is also survived by his brother, Dr Seamus O Riain, and his sister Nuala Colgan.
Eoin Ryan: born 1920, died, December 2001