Ryan, Frederick Michael (1873–1913), socialist and journalist, was born 12 October 1873 in 8 Brunswick Place, Dublin, son of John Ryan, book-keeper, and Catherine Ryan (née Davis). Little is known of his early life; he moved to London after school in the early 1890s to spend a year as a second-division clerk in a government office and returned to Dublin to a firm of auditors, where one of his colleagues was the actor Frank Fay (qv). A socialist from youth, he was a member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party founded by James Connolly (qv) in 1896. He was the first secretary of the Irish National Theatre Society and invited W. B. Yeats (qv) to become its president in August 1902 after George Russell (qv) declined the position. ‘Laying of the foundations’ (1902), his only play, was first produced in the Antient Concert Rooms on 29 October 1902. A rare work of social realism in the early literary revival, the play revolves around the clash between corrupt business, city corporations, and the working class. Its first act is now lost.
He wrote regularly for the United Irishman, Irish Independent, and Freeman's Journal (sometimes under the pseudonyms ‘Finian’ and ‘Irial’), edited the literary journal Dana for twelve issues (1904–5) with William Magee (qv), and published a selection of rationalist controversies in Criticism and courage (1906). Confident that the influence of Darwin, Mill, and Huxley would soon widely spread, he campaigned for a democratic, independent, and secular Ireland. He demanded a socially committed Irish drama in a National Literary Society debate with Padraic Colum (qv) in December 1906 and founded the Dublin Philosophical Society in 1906 to popularise rationalism. He was co-proprietor of the National Democrat, a penny monthly, from February to August 1907 with his great friend Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (qv). Sheehy-Skeffington later remembered him as a man intent on the defence of truth, justice, and liberty but Arthur Griffith (qv) was deeply antagonistic to his criticism of Irish as a hindrance to modern Ireland's progress.
Ryan moved to Egypt in 1908 to co-edit with William Moloney (qv) the English-language edition of the Egyptian Standard, the newspaper of the Egyptian nationalist Mustafa Kamil, whose posthumous Letters of Mustafa Kamil Pasha (1909) Ryan edited. He had returned to Dublin by May 1909 and was a founder of the Socialist Party of Ireland in June 1909. Secretary to the Young Ireland branch of the United Irish League in early 1911, he was soon forced by poverty to move to London to edit (March 1911–November 1912) Egypt, the journal of the English anti-imperialist Wilfrid Blunt (qv). Able to analyse imperial systems in the diverse territories of India, Persia, and Egypt, and keen to expose their mismanagement, he was one of the most gifted journalists that Ireland produced in a period of intense newspaper activity. He was taken ill on a visit to Blunt's home and died there on 7 April 1913 after an operation for appendicitis. Buried in Crawley monastery in Sussex, he was the subject of two of Blunt's poems, ‘To a dead journalist’ and ‘To Frederick Ryan’.