CIARAN RYAN (1934-1973)

Fr. Ciaran Ryan was born in Athlone, Co. Westmeath in 1934, the son of national teachers. He attended Mount Temple N.S., where his father was principal for almost forty years and after some years at the Marist College in Athlone, completed his secondary education at the diocesan St. Mel’s College in Longford.

During these years he was an outstanding Gaelic footballer, winning a Leinster Championship medal with Westmeath as a minor player in 1952, and later being a member of the Athlone senior team that dominated the county club championship from 1955 to 1962, winning the title in each year. He also played on the Westmeath senior county team in that timespan. 

He entered St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1952, alongside his brother Michael. for priestly service in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise. He graduated in Science in 1955, following which he studied for his Master’s Degree, attained in 1957 under the supervision of Professor James McConnell. 

He was ordained in 1961 at Maynooth by Cardinal Agagianian, the prelate who represented the Pope at the Patrician celebrations of that year. He then attended the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, earning his PhD in 1962 for his research on "A Doublet scheme for the Leptons and On a Generalised Commutation Relation" under Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh.  He carried out post-graduate research and taught at the University of Rochester before returning briefly to join the teaching staff at St. Mel's College and then at UCD, where he held a senior lectureship and continued his research, co-authoring the book Theory of Weak Interactions in Particle Physics (Wiley, 1969). 

By another unusual co-incidence, Athlone had produced another mathematical physicist cleric at about the same time - the Franciscan Dermott McCrea, also born in 1934, who was educated at University College Galway, Louvain, and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and was also on the staff of University College Dublin (he died in 1994, the year in which his Algebraic Computing in General Relativity was published).

Fr. Ryan was also noted during these years for his involvement in human and civil rights movements, including Amnesty International and groups advocating against oppression of minorities in Northern Ireland, and participated in the early activities of the Association of Irish Priests.

In 1972 Ciaran Ryan took sabbatical leave from his position at UCD and went to Geneva to carry out research at the European Nuclear Research Centre there. In January 1973, he died tragically in a hill-walking accident, the third such incident to affect Maynooth-educated priest-scientists from Ardagh and Clonmacnoise in a ten-year period (the previous incident had happened less than eighteen months before; for an account of the tragic sequence, click here )