These were turbulent times for the Ryans: the family home was raided on several occasions, both Jim and Mairin spent time on the run, and Jim was again interned from December 1920 to August 1921. In 1919, he married Mairin Cregan, a fellow republican activist, and their first son, Eoin, was born in the following year. Following his release from internment, Jim returned to UCD to take his final medical exams, after which he moved to Wexford, where he set up practice as a GP, and in 1918 was elected Sinn Fein MP for Wexford. Jim himself joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and was sworn into the IRB in 1914, whilst on the weekend before the Rising was entrusted with a number of confidential missions, to Cork, Tipperary and to Cork again, before joining his fellow insurgents at the GPO. All of the Ryan children enjoyed a secondary education, five of them went on to university, and several of them – including Jim as well as his sisters Min, Kit and Nell – became deeply involved in republican activities. Born in 1892, James Ryan was one of twelve children of a prosperous, strongly nationalist farming family at Tomcoole, near Taghmon in Co Wexford.
They slept that night “on the small green plot in front of the Rotunda Hospital”, surrounded by military and police, and on Sunday were taken to internment in England, before being released in August 1916. Following an abortive effort to escape along Moore Street and the general surrender on the Saturday, Ryan and his comrades laid down their arms in front of the Gresham Hotel. Stafford Jail 1916 with Michael Collins (back, right) Having, as he said, “elected for training in the fighting forces”, he expected to be deployed as a marksman, but was instead ordered to take charge of the impromptu hospital set up in the building, and over the days that followed his many patients included James Connolly, suffering from gunshot wounds to his right shoulder and ankle.
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