Priest ‘killed doctor to hide secret lovechild’

IRELAND
The Times

Lynne Kelleher
August 19 2017
The Times

A Leitrim priest had a local doctor murdered in 1923 because he knew the priest had fathered a child with his teenage housekeeper, the GP’s relatives have claimed.

An RTÉ radio documentary reveals that the priest was never charged with the murder but did go on trial for abandoning a two-week-old girl a month before the shooting.

Father Edward Ryans, 37, and Kate Brown, his 19-year-old housekeeper, were caught leaving the baby, Rose Brown, opposite the Black Church in Dublin in February 1923.

A month later, Paddy Muldoon, 32, was shot dead in the town of Mohill, Co Leitrim, when walking out on to the street after a card game during the final months of the Civil War. He had treated the housekeeper during the early stages of her pregnancy, and, asked by her family to arrange an illegal abortion, had refused.

The story of an IRA-supporting rebel priest allegedly arranging the execution of the local doctor and the efforts by the state, church and rebel forces to keep it under wraps will be aired on RTÉ Radio 1 at 1pm today.

Newly discovered archive material from sources, including the Muldoon family, are used to piece together the events surrounding the murder and the maverick priest who once used his car to ferry escaped IRA convicts.

In archive footage, Thomas William Muldoon, a nephew of the doctor, tells how his father was told who killed the GP by a canon at the funeral.

“On the day of the funeral, a priest, he was a Canon Pitman, told my father, ‘I believe it was Father Ryans who shot him’.”

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