Limerick man who broke Nazi codes honoured in home place

ABBEYFEALE will remember Ireland’s foremost Nazi codebreaker this weekend when it will unveil a plaque in the Square to native son Richard J Hayes, who was also Director of the National Libary.

And a large contingent of Richard Hayes’ relatives, including his sister, his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other relatives are travelling to Abbeyfeale for the event.

Marc McMenamin, the documentary maker and author who brought Richard Hayes’ achievements during World War 2 to a wider audience, will also attend.

The event is being organised by Abbeyfeale Community Council, and council chairman, Maurice O’Connell said they were very pleased and honoured by the response to their initiative. “The fact that so many of Richard Hayes’ relatives are travelling is very significant,” he said.

The plaque is located on the Bank of Ireland building in The Square, where Richard Hayes was born in 1902, the son of the then bank manager Richard Snr.

The young Richard was clever, excelling at Clongowes and later pursuing three degree courses at the same time and becoming fluent in several languages including German as well as being a brilliant mathematician. He got a post in the National Library and was later to become its national director.

How he first became connected with Military Intelligence remains a mystery but with the outbreak WW11 began he was headhunted for G2, the Irish Military Intelligence section. Ireland, although neutral, was of interest to the German High Command and Richard Hayes’ job, because of his mathematical prowess, was to break the codes of messages coming from and to Germany into Ireland could be understood.

He was, by any measure, successful at it and made a number of significant breakthroughs, one of which was the discovery of microdot coding. Another concerned German spy Herman Gortz who was dispatched to Ireland with one of the most sophisticated ciphers or codes in use by the Germans. At the time, there were 16 people working in Bletchley Park in England trying to break this code but it was Richard Hayes who did so, using measures that today read like an old-fashioned spy thriller. Gathering up burnt pieces of paper and applying chemicals to them is as James Bond as you can get.

A third significant breakthrough involved the spy from Kilkee, John Francis O’Reilly who was trained as a spy in Germany and was parachuted into West Clare. He brought with him a code-cipher wheel or device which Richard Hayes set about analysing and discovered that Germany had developed an entirely new system of carrying out substitution and transposition ciphers, the keys to any code. This information was shared with British intelligence and was the break-through in decoding German messages in the build-up to the Battle of the Bulge.

“At the end of the war, Hayes was described as a colossus whose gifts amount to genius,” Marc McMeniman told the Limerick Leader when his book was published last autumn. But he added: “He has almost written himself out of history.” Richard Hayes rarely if ever spoke about his work, he pointed out. “It was the ethos of the time… you just didn’t talk about it.”.

He described Richard Hayes as very discreet, a man with a very dry sense of humour who loved peace and quiet. “He loved learning and would hate anything to get the better of him,” he continued. In the best sense, he was a practical public servant, a man with a huge sense of duty, who didn’t seek fame and didn’t like a fuss or a crowd.”

But Marc added, he would have wanted things to be on the historical record.

And a bit of that historical record will be marked this Saturday.