The Murder of Dr Muldoon E-Book

In memory of the victims of the Irish Civil War 1922–23, and their families.

Inhalt

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Epilogue

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Prologue

The gathering took place on a dark winter’s evening on 17 January 1923, at the modest home of the parish priest in the small village of Cloone in County Leitrim. Three members of the local clergy were in attendance: the parish priest, Fr Deniston, a young curate named Edward Dunne, and Fr Edward Ryans, a curate from the neighbouring parish of Aughavas. The local doctor, Paddy Muldoon, and his wife, Rita, had driven the five miles or so from the town of Mohill for the meeting. But this wasn’t a social gathering and any pleasantries exchanged soon gave way to the more serious matter at hand – the crisis pregnancy of Fr Ryans’ housekeeper, Mary Kate Gallogly.

An hour or so into the meeting, Fr Ryans became highly agitated. Suddenly and without warning he pulled an automatic pistol from his cassock and began waving it around the room in a threatening manner. While everyone there was shocked by a man of the cloth using a lethal weapon to make his feelings known, only one person kept a written account of the events of that night: Rita Muldoon.1

In her own words: ‘Fr. R produced Automatic and informed guests and especially Dr. M and myself that the weapon would account for 12 men, told us also that he carried this with impunity, that he had often escaped search when others were being held up and searched by Free S. Troops.’2

The priest was clearly angered by the intervention of Paddy and Rita Muldoon into his affairs, but while his behaviour that night was undoubtedly volatile and unhinged, it would only grow worse in the following weeks. His subsequent actions would create a scandal of national proportions, affecting a pregnant young woman, her child, and a peaceful, hard-working doctor and his family.

All of their lives would be changed forever.

Chapter 1

On the morning of 18 January 1923, Rita Lee Muldoon set off by train for Dublin.1 She was making the journey as part of her duties to help look after the business of her husband Paddy’s medical dispensary, a practice covering an area around the town of Mohill in south County Leitrim. Her trip started at Dromod station, the point at which the Midland Great Western railway service came closest to Mohill as it made its way from Sligo to Dublin.

The train journey to Dublin would have taken Rita through the towns of Longford and Mullingar, by now well established as centres of control by the nascent Irish Free State. In 1921 the Irish War of Independence had ended with a truce between the British and Irish sides. After difficult negotiations, a treaty was finalised that would bring about peace between Britain and Ireland. However, disagreement over the terms of this treaty within Ireland itself led to the reshaping of the conflict from a reasonably straightforward fight against the British to horrific domestic strife during 1922. The Civil War hampered the establishment of the Irish Free State, but by early 1923 the conflict had for the most part been reduced to acts of sabotage and revenge: roads and railways were targeted, locomotives and bridges demolished. Only weeks before Rita’s journey to Dublin, stations in Ballybunion, Listowel and Sligo were destroyed by the anti-Treaty forces.

As Rita sat looking out at the wintry landscape unfolding across the north midlands, she had time to reflect on the events of the previous evening. It was the first time she had become fully aware of Fr Edward Ryans’ inherent violence and menace. Regardless of this, she was determined to pursue the priest in order to ensure that he did the right thing by his housekeeper, who was by now in the later stages of her pregnancy.

Rita’s involvement with the local Mohill District Nurs­ing Association, a voluntary group providing child welfare and midwifery services and other medical assistance to the poor, gave her an insight into the plight of young, and sometimes single, pregnant women in the area. When Mary Kate Gallogly’s pregnancy came to her attention, probably through the nursing association, Rita became determined to ensure that the young woman be treated with the respect she deserved.2 Even if that meant going up against the local priest.

***

Paddy and Rita Muldoon had been married almost five and a half years by January 1923. They had a young and growing family and were well settled in Mohill, a town familiar to Paddy because it lay about eight miles south of his family home.

Michael Patrick Muldoon, known as Paddy, was born on 3 September 1891, near the village of Fenagh in South Leitrim. The Muldoons were farmers and had lived in the townland of Cloodrumin for over half a century.3 His father, Patrick Muldoon, was already a thirty-five-year-old widower when he married Paddy’s mother, Mary Anne Duignan in January 1871 in the Catholic church at nearby Drumcong. Patrick Muldoon Senior had a modest farm but managed through hard work and good fortune to increase the holding to sixty acres when he acquired a plot from his brother, who emigra­ted to England around 1865.4 By 1911 the Muldoon family were comfortable enough to have added a second floor to their house and to employ a young servant girl. The census of that year also reveals a sad reality of the times: Mary Anne Muldoon had given birth to fifteen children, but only nine still lived.

Paddy was the youngest of the family, born in 1891, and he benefited from that position. Three of his older brothers, James, Thomas and Joseph, and a sister, Roseanne, had emigrated to the west coast of America between 1898 and 1910. They regularly sent money home to their parents, remittances which most likely financed the enlarging of the family home and helped provide a good education for Paddy. He attended St Mary’s College, the Marist secondary school in Dundalk. From there he went on to study medicine at the National University of Ireland in Dublin.5 Paddy attended university during the significant period of the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, and it was during these tumultuous times that he met and fell in love with Rita Lee.

Margaret, known as Rita, was four years younger than Paddy. Although they both came from relatively prosperous backgrounds in rural Ireland, Rita’s family were firmly in the middle class. The Lees, who sometimes went by the grander-sounding surname of Hession-Lee, were a Catholic family that had made significant progress up the social ladder. Rita’s father, Bernard Lee, was originally from Roundstone in County Galway but had moved to nearby Clifden, attracted by the better opportunities there. He married Margaret Hession and they had a family of four girls and four boys. Bernard was a successful merchant and publican who ran his business from the premises in Market Street that is now occupied by Vaughan’s pub and bistro. His daughters went to good schools and Rita’s older sisters, May and Delia, had the privilege of attending finishing schools in France. Rita and her younger sister, Imelda, were sent to the Dominican nuns in Eccles Street, Dublin. Two of her brothers, Michael and Alfred, qualified as doctors, while Bernard Ambrose, or Amby as he was known, became a solicitor.6

Unusually for women in Ireland at that time, Rita Lee had continued her education to university level, studying medicine in Dublin. A strikingly attractive woman, she was not particularly tall, but had a heart-shaped face and high cheekbones. In photographs from the early 1920s she has a strong, direct gaze. The family was undoubtedly proud of Rita’s academic achievements, which is why it must have dismayed them when she decided, quite suddenly, to abandon her medical studies to get married.7

On 14 August 1917, just two days before his registration as a doctor, Paddy Muldoon married Margaret Lee at the Catholic church in Clifden, County Galway. She was just twenty-one years old; he was twenty-five. Rita was already expecting their first child when they married.

The recently qualified doc­tor and his new wife left Ireland almost immediately, a deci­sion likely influenced by a desire to put some distance between themselves and their families, who were not happy about the circumstances of the marriage. Paddy and Rita moved to Wales so that Paddy could take up a position assisting a general practitioner, Dr Howell Evans, who described his practice as ‘a large panel and colliery practice in Monmouthshire where exceptional opportunities daily occur of gaining experience in Surgery, Midwifery, and General Practice’.8 Paddy and Rita’s first child, Patrick Bernard Llewellyn, known as Llew, was born in Monmouthshire on 30 January 1918, just five-and-a-half months after they were married.9

Despite the reasons for their move to Wales, it appears that shortly after the birth of Llew the Muldoons desired to return to their home country. Neither, it seemed, wanted to raise a child in exile. They had been in Wales for just six months when the young doctor applied to move back to Ireland, to his home county of Leitrim, where a large public medical practice, known as the Rynn Dispensary District of Mohill, about eight miles from where Paddy had grown up, had become vacant in March 1918.

His application met with some resistance, however. The Local Government Board in Dublin didn’t want the vacancy filled at the time, particularly by a young doctor whose ex­pertise could be utilised on the Western Front. The board’s main priority was providing doctors for the Royal Army Medi­­cal Corps, as Britain remained engaged in the Great War. This meant that there was effectively a ban on recruit­ment. However, the Mohill Board of Guardians, reflecting the growing nationalist and anti-conscription fervour at the time, disregarded the Local Government Board’s request that the position not be filled and set about appointing Paddy Muldoon. This resulted in the Local Government Board relenting and agreeing to confirm his position, initially on a temporary basis.10

Rita and Paddy Muldoon arrived back in Ireland with their young child at a time when the world was facing one of the greatest medical challenges of the twentieth century: the Spanish flu pandemic.11 The flu was sweeping through the community of South Leitrim just as Paddy was taking over the practice. The run-up to the general election of December 1918, which saw Sinn Féin emerge as the dominant political force in Ireland, helped spread the outbreak of the flu, with its mass meetings and countrywide movement of party activists. In such an unprecedented medical emergency, the Rynn Dispensary area, sixteen miles long and six miles broad, was lucky to have the services of a young, energetic doctor.12

A local newspaper reported on the challenges facing the young Muldoon: ‘He was on his feet night and day attending his patients. No distance or circumstances hindered him in the discharge of his onerous duties and his name was popular in every household in South Leitrim.’13 By the time the Spanish flu pandemic had worked its way through the world’s population, which included more than 20,000 victims in Ireland, Paddy Muldoon had earned the respect of the people he served.

As a result, by 1923 he and Rita were firmly established and respected in South Leitrim. Now thirty-one, Paddy had become used to long hours and a challenging workload. In spite of these, photographs of him at the time show a round, amiable face, which gave him the appearance of a much younger man. Known for his fine physique and good horse-riding skills, he was obliging in his work and personal life, and clearly loved his role as a country doctor. He was a regular sight rushing to patients spread across a wide area in his Model T Ford touring car, a rare enough sight on the back roads of the county at the time. On occasion he cut a particular dash travelling on his motorbike, a Douglas 250cc tourer, capable of forty-five miles an hour on the winding country roads.

Rita was just as busy as her husband. As well as looking after the three young children they had at this stage – Llew, Olwyn and Des – and running a busy household, Rita managed the accounts of the medical practice. Her journey to Dublin on 18 January was for the purpose of meeting the Paymaster General of the Free State army in relation to payments for her husband’s services to troops. In addition to his main occupation as a dispensary doctor, Paddy Muldoon also had a role as a medical officer to the National Army.14

The Muldoons had, by then, been involved in providing medical care in South Leitrim during four years of conflict, starting with the War of Independence and continuing into the Civil War that followed. Paddy provided medical care to both sides in the Civil War without fear or favour and would often have someone from the government side coming in the front door of the house to attend his surgery at the same time as an anti-Treaty supporter was leaving by the back. Still, Rita had taken the precaution of sewing a large red cross on Paddy’s overcoat, so that when he was out on calls in the countryside he wouldn’t be mistaken for a combatant by either side.15

However, it wasn’t the general conflict that was on Rita’s mind that January day, but the potential for more trouble from the priest who had produced a weapon the previous night. She would later come to learn that the entire town of Mohill, it seemed, was aware of the out-of-control behaviour of this priest, and his later activities would come as no surprise to many locals. It was common knowledge, after all, that Ryans was deeply involved with anti-Treaty forces in the area, a group who were causing no end of trouble.

Her railway journey to Dublin ended safely at the Broadstone depot, less than a mile north of the city centre. As she left the station, Rita, who was pregnant again, could not have known how significant this railway terminus would become in the weeks ahead, with a pivotal and bizarre event in the Muldoons’ and Ryans’ story playing out in its vicinity.

Chapter 2

Coolebawn House, the Muldoon family home and surgery, was a substantial five-bedroom, semi-detached property located on Station Road on the southeast side of the town of Mohill. The road, which took its name from the narrow-gauge railway station that had opened in 1887, used to run parallel to the railway line before curving to the left over a small, partially culverted tributary of the River Rinn, turning into Main Street and rising in a gradual climb to the imposing Catholic church of Saint Patrick on the western edge of Mohill.1

Mohill sits neatly at the southern end of County Leitrim, an area pockmarked by small lakes sitting among some reasonably good farmland. The name itself comes from the Irish word for soft or spongy ground, although it is far enough south of the large upland bogs of the Arigna hills. The town’s history stretches back 1,500 years to a monastery founded by Saint Manachán.2 Over the centuries the area was subjected to invasion and plantation, and the monastery was closed during the reign of King Henry VIII. In the seventeenth century the town and some of the adjacent lands passed into the ownership of the Crofton family. The Clements family, who owned land outside the town, included William Sydney Clements, the 3rd Earl of Leitrim, who is remembered as one of the most notorious landlords of nineteenth-century Ireland.

By the 1920s Mohill had established itself as a moderately prosperous market town with twenty-nine public houses and a hinterland population of about 2,000. The Muldoons were happy here, despite the troubles with the ongoing Civil War.

As they were having such a busy and successful time in Mohill, Paddy and Rita needed help with their growing family. They found it in a young woman named Kate Kerr. Like Ryans’ housekeeper, Mary Kate Gallogly, nineteen-year-old Kate Kerr was from the local area. The young woman became close to the Muldoon children and loved her life with them, happy to take care of them while Rita and Paddy built their life in Mohill. The children were very fond of Kate, and Paddy and Rita intended to help her get a recognised qualification as a nanny when the time came for her to move on.3

For all of Rita’s busyness, however, when she returned to Mohill from Dublin that January of 1923, she had made her mind up about one thing. She would keep a close eye on Fr Ryans and his activities.

***

Edward Ryans was curate in the parish of Aughavas, about eight miles northeast of the town of Mohill and just a few dozen miles from his family home. The Ryans family were coal miners, originally working the pits around Durham, in the northeast of England, for a couple of generations before Edward’s father, Joseph, brought his family back to Ireland when he came to work in the Arigna coal mines in County Roscommon in the early 1890s. Joseph Ryans became a mine engineer and the family, eventually, were able to move to the large, well-appointed Knockranny House in the village of Keadue in Roscommon, a few miles from the Leitrim border.

Born in Durham in 1886, Edward Ryans came to live in Ireland as a young child in the 1890s with the rest of his family. His father’s position as an engineer in the successful Arigna coal mines provided the money for the young Ed­ward to attend St Mel’s secondary school in Longford town as a boarder. He was a talented student and took a path familiar to many Irish Catholic families at that time. He was the second eldest and, as with many in this position (the eldest usually took over the family farm, although in this case the Ryans weren’t farmers), he was destined for a life in the priesthood.

In 1904 Ryans progressed from St Mel’s to Maynooth in County Kildare to study for the priesthood. As a student of theology, Ryans excelled at Saint Patrick’s seminary in Maynooth, where some of the brightest talents studied hard and prepared for religious life. He was exceptional at French, winning prizes for French grammar and essays in the language on ‘Gothic Architecture’.4 In June 1911, on taking his vows at ordination, the twenty-five-year-old novice became Fr Edward Ryans.5

Fr Ryans was no ordinary priest. His first appointment was as curate to the parish of Annaduff in Leitrim, but it was after he moved to Rathcline parish in neighbouring County Longford in 1913 that his political reputation began to develop.6 By 1917 he had become heavily involved in the growing republican movement and by the end of the year he had been elected president of the Executive of Sinn Féin Clubs in South Longford.7

In the spring of 1917 republicans from all over Ireland descended on South Longford to campaign for what would be a famous victory for Joseph McGuinness, the Sinn Féin electoral candidate. Sinn Féin was initially founded as a nationalist party that advocated change by non-violent means, but it had been associated with radical political activity in Ireland and, incorrectly, with the Easter Rising, by the British and the main nationalist party, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which favoured Home Rule. After the Rising, Sinn Féin benefited from growing nationalist anger and resent­ment over the execution of the Rising’s leaders and the im­prisonment of large numbers of people, many of whom had taken no active part in the rebellion. This by-election would be one of the party’s first attempts to gain political legitimacy.8

Fr Ryans found himself in the right place to play a central role in the campaign to elect Joseph McGuinness, an Irish Volunteer who was actually in prison in England at the time of the election for his part in the Rising. The campaign gave rise to the slogan ‘Put him in to get him out’.9

One campaigning republican sympathiser was Elizabeth Corr, a member of Cumann na mBan, who had travelled from Belfast.10 Her account of the election campaign reveals that ‘the majority of the parish priests, headed by the Bishop were against us.’ However, she goes on to describe meeting ‘the famous Fr Ryans who is looked upon as a second Fr O’Flanagan’, a reference to another rebel cleric who would later become the joint national vice-president of Sinn Féin.11

Fr Ryans told Elizabeth and her campaigning group that ‘in his village, Lanesboro [sic], McGuinness polled nine-tenths of the vote’. This left her with the belief that ‘if we had a Father O’Flanagan or a Father Ryans in every parish in Ireland Sinn Féin would sweep the country’.12 McGuinness ultimately won the by-election for Sinn Féin by the tightest of margins, a mere thirty-seven votes.

While Ryans’ success in gaining votes for Sinn Féin among his parishioners might have captivated Miss Corr, it made a poor impression on his bishop. After all, Bishop Hoare and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy had long given their strong support to John Redmond’s IPP.13 Many years later Ryans would record that his difficult relationship with Bishop Hoare, his diocesan superior, began around the time of the South Longford by-election of May 1917.14

Sure enough, shortly after the election, in September 1917, Fr Ryans was moved to the parish of Abbeylara in North Longford. It is highly likely that this move was a direct result of the bishop’s displeasure with the curate’s involvement in the by-election. By chance, however, this move brought Ryans further into republican circles. Abbeylara is not far from Ballinalee, the home place of Seán Mac Eoin, the legendary Longford IRA leader. Ryans and Mac Eoin became friends around this time because of their shared republican feelings and activities.

By the time he arrived in Aughavas parish in South Leitrim in 1918, Edward Ryans’ reputation was based more on his political activities than his clerical duties or previous academic achievements. He had become something of a hero within the republican movement, a reputation that had left him at serious odds with his religious superiors.

Once in Aughavas, Ryans continued to combine his cleri­cal duties with political activity. He even served as a judge in the republican Sinn Féin courts, a system of arbitration set up to replace the crown courts and help under­mine British rule by replacing a crucial part of the existing British State’s machinery in Ireland.15 This was another in a series of roles and activities that put Ryans at odds with the Church around this time. His political activities are probably why, although he had served as a priest for almost a decade and had been an acclaimed scholar at Maynooth, Ryans never attained the prestigious position of parish priest.

However, it was not just these activities that got Ryans in trouble. While in Aughavas he shared clerical duties with a Fr Joseph McGivney. One of the disputes Ryans had with the local church at this time involved arguments with McGivney over money, to the point that McGivney announced from the pulpit that Ryans wasn’t to be entrusted with any parish dues or revenues, evidently because they weren’t being properly accounted for.16

The heroic reputation that Ryans had cultivated within the republican movement also threatened to lose its shine for a time, when he became involved in another controversy about money. In his role as a judge in the Sinn Féin courts, Ryans had a responsibility for handling fines imposed by the court and passing on the funds collected, as well as other monies received in his capacity as a member of the local Sinn Féin Executive. This money was ultimately destined for the financing of the War of Independence. However, a colleague of Ryans in Leitrim Sinn Féin, Michael Reilly of Aughavas, became annoyed about a number of issues involving Ryans and wrote a formal letter of complaint about the priest. It seems Ryans had not provided a receipt for £53 collected in October 1919 for the Self Determination Fund administered centrally by Michael Collins. When Ryans was challenged on this issue, he apparently claimed that ‘he gave the money to Michael Collins personally and that he neither asked for or got a receipt from him’.17

Ryans’ difficulties with parish and Sinn Féin finances suggest that he may have been misappropriating funds to supplement his meagre income as a rural cleric.

Ryans was also unusual for a priest at that time, and especially a rural curate, in that he owned a car. A Liberty Six cost about £500 at the time, much more than a year’s salary for most people. Ryans would later claim that he purchased his Liberty Six, which had many extras, for that price.18 It would seem that he purchased the car from a Fr Thomas Tubman, a Ballinamore native, who had been on an extended holiday from Reno, Nevada, where he served as parish priest.19 The car would have been exchanged before Tubman’s return to New York on 24 November 1920, the very same month that Fr Ryans’ disagreement over parish finances with his parish priest, Fr McGivney, came to a head.20

Given the questions raised about his handling of both parish and Sinn Féin funds, and his unearthing of a large amount of money to buy the car, it certainly seems that Ryans had found his own way of financing a more expensive lifestyle than that of a typical rural cleric.

Despite these issues, the rebel priest was able to deepen his involvement in politics and, to an extent, in military activity during the War of Independence. His brother Vincent and sister Margaret were very active in the IRA and Cumann na mBan respectively in the Arigna area, and Edward Ryans himself became a subject of interest to the crown forces on numerous occasions. It is clear that his involvement certainly went beyond his role as a politically outspoken priest and it becomes evident from his letters at this time that, because of his more militant activities, Fr Ryans did not feel safe living in the parish house at Aughavas. Consequently, he spent periods of time on the run.

Life as a fugitive, even a part-time one, compromised Ryans’ ability to carry out his clerical duties and put further pressure on his bishop to deal effectively with this rebel cleric. His strong commitment to the republican cause remained, however, in spite of the bishop’s disapproval of his involvement in political affairs.21

The precarious situation that Ryans was in with his superiors dragged on until 22 June 1921, when the partition of Ireland by the British government was formally inaugurated with the opening of the Northern Ireland parliament in Belfast. Peace negotiations between the British government and Sinn Féin, which had been progressing intermittently since late the previous year, were given fresh impetus.

On 11 July 1921 the Truce to end the War of Indepen­dence came into effect. The arrival of peace brought great relief, with the lifting of the general sense of fear and des­pondency that had permeated the country for almost two-and-a-half years. Men like Edward Ryans, who had been on the run, suddenly reappeared and were feted as heroes in their localities. This relief was not to last, however.

The Treaty that followed negotiations during the Truce was ratified in Dáil Éireann by a narrow majority in early January 1922, after weeks of bitter argument and dissent among the hitherto united Sinn Féin. Despite the ratification, the country was clearly divided about the Treaty.

On 22 January, Fr Ryans presided over a meeting of the South Leitrim Executive of Sinn Féin Clubs, held in Mohill, to discuss the Treaty. The Executive voted overwhelmingly to approve the Treaty and nominated Fr Ryans to represent them at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis to be held in Dublin the following month.22

It seems that Ryans was initially a firm supporter of the Treaty. He is described in a newspaper report as speaking strongly in its favour, along with a number of local members of the Dáil, at a meeting in Carrick-on-Shannon on St Patrick’s Day 1922.23 This meeting was held to launch the pro-Treaty electoral campaign for the general election of June 1922, which would allow the public their say on the Treaty.

The outcome of the June election was clear-cut, with over seventy per cent of the successful candidates representing parties who supported acceptance of the Treaty. Despite this emphatic demonstration of the people’s will, however, the dissenters would not accept the majority’s decision to take the path of gradual procurement of a republic. Early in the morning of 28 June 1922, with a certain inevitability, the Civil War commenced when the National Army attacked the anti-Treaty forces who had barricaded themselves inside Dublin’s Four Courts complex.24

Perhaps because of family pressure, Ryans switched allegiance to the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, putting himself firmly on the side of those fighting against the newly formed Irish Free State. For the remainder of 1922 it became clear that he’d picked the losing side, as the anti-Treaty forces were put on the back foot, eventually being driven away from the populated areas and gradually losing numbers.

However, one beneficial consequence of Leitrim’s remote location near the newly established border with Northern Ireland – at least from the anti-Treaty side’s perspective – was that many combatants from the North moved south, and a large column of fighters gathered and remained at large in the Arigna area on the Roscommon/Leitrim border.

Despite his switch of allegiance, Ryans had connections and loyalties on both sides in the war. Many of those on the pro-Treaty side were friends and colleagues from before the split and this was used by Ryans to his advantage. When he boasted to the Muldoons at the Cloone meeting that he could act with impunity, he had good reason to make that claim, given his reputation and connections. After all, the overall responsibility for security on behalf of the Free State in the area fell on Major General Seán Mac Eoin, the former Sinn Féin colleague and friend of Ryans from his days in Longford.

As the Civil War continued into 1923, the increasingly beleaguered anti-Treaty side resorted to more desperate tactics, and the area of South Leitrim in particular had a certain air of lawlessness. Fr Edward Ryans was at this time a familiar sight in South Leitrim, driving his Liberty Six motor car around the locality.

Ryans’ parish was in the area covered by the medical practice of Paddy Muldoon. On his rounds to treat patients, the young doctor would often drive his five-seater Ford Model T past the church where Ryans said Mass and carried out his other clerical duties. This being small-town Ireland, everybody knew everybody else, especially those in positions of power and responsibility. The two men moved in the same social circles and had developed something of a friendship based in part on their mutual acquaintances. That relationship changed dramatically during 1922, however, when one of Paddy Muldoon’s patients became pregnant: eighteen-year-old Mary Kate Gallogly, the priest’s housekeeper.

Muldoon family records show that Paddy and Rita Muldoon became aware of the pregnancy long before Ryans drew his gun at that meeting in January 1923.25 The couple had persuaded – or more likely pressured – Ryans to do the right thing and stand by Mary Kate. That would explain why she wasn’t sent, like most pregnant single women at the time, to a Magdalene home. Instead, towards the end of 1922, she had been sent to lodgings in Dublin to await the birth of her child.

Any chance Ryans had of salvaging his reputation and position as a Catholic priest in the longer term was put severely at risk by this pregnancy and everything that it implied. The political reputation he cultivated over the years would also be destroyed by what would be considered a scandal. Ryans was clearly aware of this, as he mentions later in a statement that he sought to ‘keep it cloaked’.26 He clearly believed that news of the pregnancy could potentially end his career as both a cleric and a political activist.

One thing is for sure: Rita Muldoon’s close monitoring of Fr Ryans around this time – taking note of incidents he was involved in and asking people she knew to report to her what they heard of his activities – posed a very real threat to Ryans because, along with Paddy, she had knowledge of the circumstances of the housekeeper’s pregnancy.

Chapter 3

Mary Kate Gallogly was just a teenager when she was taken on to work as housekeeper for Fr Edward Ryans. Born in 1903, she grew up on a small farm a few miles from the village of Aughavas. Her parents had married late and both were in their thirties by the time Mary Kate arrived. She had one sibling, an older brother, and the family lived with Mary Kate’s grandfather, Peter, on a smallholding in the townland of Drumshanbo North in the Aughavas area. They resided in a thatched, mud-walled, three-roomed cottage, with a cow house, a piggery and a small barn.1

A young woman like Mary Kate had few opportunities for anything apart from farm work, emigration or an early marriage. The prospect of being taken on as a priest’s housekeeper would have been exciting for a teenager, given the responsibility and prestige of such a posting.

There is no known record of any written testimony by Mary Kate as to the circumstances of her pregnancy and the events that changed her life in 1923. While others involved took the opportunity to talk and write about what followed, she appears to have remained silent. According to Ryans, Mary Kate had ‘acted as housekeeper in my house for a number of weeks in place of her cousin who had unexpectedly got married’.2

Edward Ryans took the highly unusual step of sending Mary Kate to Dublin in the later months of her pregnancy, paying for her accommodation himself and giving her clear instructions as to how she was to present herself in Dublin when the time came for the birth of the baby. She had probably never been to a city of the size and sophistication of Dublin, and we don’t know who, if anyone, visited her. She was still just a teenager when she arrived there, sometime in November 1922, alone in a strange city. Ryans clearly had the young woman under his complete control. She told none of her friends about the pregnancy; it was a secret she must have been instructed to keep.

For most single women who found themselves pregnant in 1920s Ireland, life was very difficult. Mary Kate’s pregnancy outside marriage was one of about 1,700 reported in Ireland each year during the 1920s (although there was an acknow­ledgement that unreported pregnancies and births could have doubled this number at least). It was a figure that would rise as the years went on, in spite of the best efforts of the new Free State with the support of the Church to reduce the number.3

The female body, and the role of women as mothers in par­ticular, was to become a central focus of concern to the State and the Irish Catholic Church for decades to come. In the 1920s there was a political and religious narrative suggesting that the rate of illegitimate births had been the result of the stationing of British troops in Ireland; that the servicing of garrisons under British rule had led to many women falling from grace and now it was time to ‘return the nation to purity’. There were plenty of references to the ‘collapse of chastity’ in pamphlets from lectures by members of the clergy.4 The notion of a priest’s housekeeper becoming pregnant would have been anathema to the story of a Church restoring the nation to purity.

In Mary Kate’s case, she was fortunate only in that she wasn’t sent to one of the ‘special institutions’ increasingly used around this time. Mother and baby homes run by the religious orders were often the only option for women without means who were in this situation. Instead, she was sent in a private capacity to give birth at Holles Street maternity hospital. She registered herself under a false name, Kate Brown, on arrival at the hospital, where she gave birth to her daughter on Monday 29 January 1923.

On her daughter’s arrival, Mary Kate named her Rose. Rose Brown. She gave no name for the father of her child and gave her address simply as ‘Bushwood’ in Roscommon (the county where Ryans’ family home was located).5 No place called Bushwood existed then or now.

We can imagine Mary Kate, exhausted and alone, in Holles Street hospital, looking out on the broad Georgian streets of Dublin, at the northeast corner of Merrion Square. On the opposite side of the square to the hospital were Government Buildings. In early 1923 the buildings were the locus of the emerging Free State government, which was just months in existence by then.

As the young mother held her newborn baby to her chest, she would have looked across at the physical centre of power, likely praying that everything would work out for her and her child.

***

As Mary Kate Gallogly lay in the maternity hospital in Dublin with her baby, back in Leitrim, during the early days of February 1923, Edward Ryans was acting less like a priest and more like a man losing control.

The Civil War was entering its final phase and the National Army had the task of clearing out the remaining anti-Treaty fighters, or ‘Irregulars’ as they were disparagingly called by their opponents. Attacks at this point were being carried out only intermittently and the war was just months away from coming to a complete end. There were fewer and fewer areas of the country controlled to any degree by those opposed to the Treaty, but in places like South Leitrim the level of Free State control remained constantly under threat.6

The Catholic Church had declared itself firmly pro-Treaty in its October 1922 pastoral to the faithful, and had begun to denounce the anti-Treaty campaign and refuse the sacraments to fighters. However, in spite of direct pressure from his bishop, Joseph Hoare, and the general view of his Church, Fr Ryans continued to side with – and by all accounts fight alongside – his fellow anti-Treaty rebels.