![]() He eventually ended up as a priest in Morecombe, Lancaster, in England, but even then he could not escape his past. He left Ireland in disgrace in 1926 for the US to join many other Irish people in the post-Civil War period who were fleeing their pasts. ![]() Though the Catholic Church held an iron grip on faith and morals, Ryans did not get away with his crime even though he never faced justice for the murder. This, though, was not a facile morality tale about the shortcomings of the new State. There can be no mistake that the tragic death of Dr Muldoon was instigated by Ryans who still professes to save souls Frank Aiken, Kevin O’Higgins, Richard Mulcahy and General Sean Mac Éoin were all involved in one way or another. Lemass, a shrewd judge of character, was not convinced by Ryans protestations of innocence, though he believed the gulf in evidence was such that the case should simply be dropped. Both Éamon de Valera and Sean Lemass were involved. The Muldoon murder became a microcosm of the new State. “My husband’s death was not the result of an unavoidable accident, but a carefully planned, cruel, callous murder,” she pointed out. Rita Muldoon wrote to all the Irish newspapers. Ryans belief that this would vindicate his reputation had the opposite effect. To nobody’s surprise his erstwhile comrades exonerated Ryans and said Muldoon and his companion had been mistaken in the dim light for “(Free) Staters in mufti” and his shooting had been an “unavoidable accident”. In 1924 he asked the local anti-Treaty IRA to conduct an investigation into Dr Muldoon’s murder. Ryans was released from jail in December 1923 having served time for the abandonment, but he never stood trial for murder. “Rita had begun 1923 as a happily married Leitrim doctor’s wife, but had finished the year a widow,” the authors observed. Rita Muldoon’s life was never the same again, but she doggedly pursued justice and truth for her late husband. Paddy and Rita Muldoon and two of their children She had been sent to a detention centre for women run by the Free State army in Athlone and then to a lunatic asylum. His co-defendant, Gallogly, never appeared alongside him. Ryans went on trial in Dublin for abandonment of the child, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. Quite why Ryans, who already had a reputation for violence, resorted to such measures was not explained, but the inference was clear – Dr Muldoon knew the priest was the father of the child. M and myself that the weapon would account for 12 men,” Rita Muldoon later wrote in a contemporaneous account. The meeting was called to discuss the crisis pregnancy of Mary Kate Gallogly.Īt that meeting Fr Ryans produced an automatic pistol and began waving it around. Present were Dr Muldoon and his wife Rita Ryans and two other priests. The story began with a stormy meeting in a house in Cloone, Co Leitrim, on January 17th, 1923. The case was also the subject of a RTÉ Radio documentary, An Unholy Trinity, first broadcast in 2017. The book The Murder of Dr Muldoon was published in 2019 and its authors Ken Boyle and Tim Desmond had access to documents related to the case that were not in the public domain before. Nobody was ever convicted of his murder, but there is little doubt now that it was Ryans who ordered the shooting of someone who knew too much about the circumstances of his housekeeper’s pregnancy. He slumped in the middle of the road and was pronounced dead by a fellow doctor. It was, instead, about lust, deceit and revenge.ĭr Muldoon had emerged from a game of cards at the parish priest’s house when three men wearing trench coats approached him. ![]() Yet the murder was only tangentially about the Civil War. Photograph: Leland Duncan Lewis © Irish Picture Library, Davison & Associates The man who most likely pulled the trigger was a notorious anti-Treaty IRA agitator John Charles Keegan, who terrorised the people of south Leitrim for a time during the Civil War.īridge Street and Mohill Courthouse, 1889. Though Dr Muldoon was a medical doctor for the National Army, he also treated those from the anti-Treaty side. The death of Dr Paddy Muldoon on March 18th, 1923, shocked Ireland at a time towards the latter end of the Civil War when bloodshed on the streets was common. The incident would lead directly to a murder on the streets of Mohill, Co Leitrim, five weeks later. ![]()
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