THE CHAIRMAN:THE APPOINTMENT of Seán Ryan to chair the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was welcomed at the time by Colm O'Gorman, then head of One in Four, who praised his "professionalism and direct approach".
This view was echoed by other survivor groups, many of which had experience of him as counsel for the Ferns inquiry and chairman of the Compensation Advisory Committee.
Mr Justice Ryan was born on March 27th, 1948. He attended O’Connell School in Dublin and UCD, where he studied law, before qualifying as a barrister in the King’s Inns.
He was called to the Bar in 1972, thus pursuing a path followed shortly afterwards by former attorney general and minister for justice Michael McDowell, Supreme Court judge Adrian Hardiman and High Court judges John MacMenamin and Frank Clarke.
Seán Ryan practised on the south-eastern circuit with a mixed practice covering common law, personal injuries, criminal law (he was a frequent prosecutor) and judicial review. He had a very large practice as a junior counsel, and took silk quite young, at the age of 35, in 1983.
As a senior counsel he had many State briefs, and, according to a colleague, was seen as “a safe pair of hands”.
He prosecuted in some of the cases concerning institutional abuse, so when he was asked to chair the Commission on Child Abuse he “knew what the issues were”, according to a solicitor familiar with the area.
He had also chaired the Compensation Advisory Committee, which prepared guidelines on compensation to be paid to claimants to the Residential Institutions Redress Board. He gave no quarter to what he saw as recalcitrant witnesses during some of the hearings of the commission, according to one observer. “He once reminded a Reverend Mother what an oath was, and rose for 15 minutes telling her to consider her evidence.”
There was some surprise when he was appointed as judge of the High Court and chairman of the commission in December 2003, following the resignation of Ms Justice Laffoy.