Early and Private Life
Ryan was born on the family farm at Tomcoole, near Taghmon, County Wexford in 1891. The second youngest of twelve children he was educated at St Peter's College, Wexford and Ring College, Waterford. In 1911 Ryan won a county council scholarship to University College Dublin where he studied medicine. He passed his final medical exam in March 1917 and subsequently opened a medical practice in Wexford town. Four years later in 1921 Ryan moved to Dublin where he opened a practice at Harcourt Street, specialising in skin diseases at the Skin and Cancer Hospital on Holles Street. He left medicine in 1925 after he bought Kendlestown, a large farm near Delgany, County Wicklow. Ryan lived there and it remained a working farm until his death.
In July 1919 Ryan married Máirín Creegan, originally from County Kerry and a close friend of Sinéad de Valera throughout her life. Creegan, like her husband, had also fought in the Easter Rising and was subsequently an author of children's stories in Irish. They had three children together.
One of Ryan's sisters, Mary Kate, married Seán T. O'Kelly, one of Ryan’s future cabinet colleagues and a future President of Ireland. Following her death O'Kelly married her sister, Phyllis Ryan. Another of Ryan’s sisters, Josephine ('Min') Ryan, married Richard Mulcahy, a future leader of Fine Gael.
Read more about this topic: James Ryan (Irish Politician)
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