Second paragraph of third chapter:

One concern faced by the Ryans was penal legislation, which dictated the Inch estate be equally divided between John Ryan’s four sons unless the eldest converted to the Established Church and became the sole heir.⁶ But Egan was not just concerned with legal interference. ‘I hope’, he added in his letter to Frances Ryan, ‘the proper care is taken of all ye papers & other Effects to prevent Embeazlem[en]t’.⁷ Egan was clearly aware that problems could just as easily arise among less scrupulous associates and family members. As will emerge, John Ryan’s family faced many challenges over the coming years, but they were not alone. Besides Egan, Ryan had assembled a trusted group of extended family members who, for almost three decades, cumulatively formed a unified body resembling a ‘composite’ John Ryan. The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the importance of extended family and kinship in safeguarding the Ryan family and their estate, and in doing so to shed light on the workings of kinship and the world the Ryans inhabited as members of the Catholic gentry.
⁶ Charles Ivar McGrath, ‘The provisions for conversion in the penal laws, 1695–1750’ in Michael Brown, Charles Ivar McGrath and Thomas P. Power (eds), Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 2005), pp 41–2.
⁷ H. Egan to F. Ryan, 21 Mar. 1724 (Boole, Ryan Collection, MS 345).

This is a 2018 PhD thesis by Richard Fitzpatrick available for download here (at present anyway), looking at the history of the Ryans of Inch House, Co. Tipperary, from 1650 to 1831, before, during and after the times when penal laws pushed most of the well-off Catholics of Ireland into being much less well-off. It's of particular personal interest to me because my father’s paternal grandmother was Caroline Letitia ("Cora") Ryan, born to a Whyte-Ryan marriage in 1843 after the scope of the thesis ends, and so these are my ancestors: successively John Ryan (d. 1666), Daniel Ryan (1660-1692), another John Ryan (1692-1724), another Daniel Ryan (1710-1767), George Ryan (1737-1805) and Cora's father the second George Ryan (1791-1875) as well as their wives, brothers, sisters and extended family. Fitzpatrick has delved deeply into the Ryan family papers in Cork, and supplemented them with many other sources. It's all pretty intense stuff, but will reward the patient reader.

The Ryans managed to hang on to Inch during the Penal Laws by keeping a low profile and also frankly through skullduggery, though their income never quite seemed to match their expenditure. From time to time they retreated out of Ireland to avoid creditors – though the worst of these were often close relatives, who are difficult to completely evade. The basic problem was that the estate was tied up in various legal settlements, partly to get around the legal restrictions on Catholics, and could not be sold; at the same time, if they were in residence in Inch, the Ryans were expected to offer traditionally generous Celtic hospitality, particularly given their involvement with the Cork wine trade, and this stretched their financial resources beyond their means.

The life of the first George Ryan (1737-1805) is pretty incredible. As the third son, he was not expected to inherit, and was sent off to Spain to become a merchant. By a succession of circumstances he ended up as the deputy governor of the province of Huanta in Peru in the 1770s, and became known as Don Jorge. When his remaining brother died in 1778, he came home to Ireland to manage the estate, only to find the accounts deeply in the red, on top of which his late brother had bequeathed the entire contents of Inch House to his wife, who had stripped the place bare before leaving. Don Jorge found it convenient to go to the continent, settling first in Belgium and then France where one of his children was born on Bastille Day, 14 July 1789. He eventually managed to salvage the Inch estate by selling half of it, and ensuring a tidy succession to his sons in due course.

For me, the most startling new fact was that John Ryan (1692-1724), my 5x great-grandfather, was killed in a duel by John Whyte (d. 1741), also my 5x great-grandfather. They were in dispute about one of the property transactions regarding the estate of Nicholas Purcell, Baron of Loughmoe, who had died in 1722; Ryan was deeply involved with Purcell's financial interests, while Whyte was Purcell's son-in-law and alleged in public that Ryan had acted unethically and illegally; with fatal results. But clearly by the time the second George Ryan married Catharine Whyte in 1839, 115 years after her great-great-grandfather had killed his great-grandfather, the families had decided to let bygones be bygones.

This will hopefully be turned into a book in due course, but meantime I'm glad that Maynooth and the author have made the thesis version available freely.