Early Life
His parents were National School teachers at Bottomstown (parish of Knockainey) with a taste for Irish traditional music, and they lived in a house full of books. He attended St. Colman's College, Fermoy. From then on he was devoted to the restoration of the Irish language.
He studied Celtic Studies at University College Dublin, where he was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) training corps. He left before graduating in order to join the IRA's East Limerick Brigade in 1922. He fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War, and was wounded and interned. In November 1923 he was released and returned to University College Dublin. He was active in a number of Irish-language societies (in 1924 he won the Cumann Gaedhealach's gold medal for oratory in Irish) and wrote for Irish-language publications - he briefly edited An Reult (Irish: The Star). He formed the University Republican Club and led it on demonstrations. He graduated in 1925.
After graduating he taught Irish at Mountjoy School (a Protestant school in Dublin), but journalism was his vocation. His day job was editing Irish Travel for the Tourist Board, while he also edited An tÓglach (Irish: The Volunteer) for the IRA. Evenings were devoted to teaching Irish at Conradh na Gaeilge, lecturing in history and literature, and leading the occasional céilidh.
In 1926, he was appointed adjutant of the Dublin Brigade and given the job of reorganising it. He was always an anti-imperialist, and Peadar O'Donnell believes the biggest influence on Ryan's thinking in those days was the anti-Imperialist Congress in Paris, which he attended with Donal O'Donoghue, as delegates of the IRA, in 1927. In 1929 Ryan was appointed editor of the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht, where he worked alongside Geoffrey Coulter, his assistant. Together they turned it into a lively political paper and boosted the readership substantially. In this year he was elected to the Army Executive, the body below the IRA Army Council.
In May 1930 Ryan spent several weeks in the US, addressing Irish conventions, where he witnessed the start of the Great Depression. In 1931 he was imprisoned for publishing seditious articles in An Phoblacht. Later that year, he was again imprisoned for contempt of court.
Read more about this topic: Frank Ryan (Irish Republican)
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