Patrick Rice

Patrick Rice was born in Fermoy, Co. Cork, in September 1945. Ordained a Divine Word Missionary in 1970, he was sent to Argentina as chaplain at the Catholic University of Santa Fe, joined the Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld and worked as a worker-priest in Santa Fe. In 1974 he moved to the Villa Soldati shanty town in Buenos Aires, where a 1978 document of his community describes him as its superior.

In October 1976 he and Fátima Cabrera, an 18-year-old catechist, were abducted after a prayer meeting and tortured for days. The Irish Times, the Argentine foreign ministry and University College Cork give the date as 11 October; his own complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reportedly gives 12 October. The foreign ministry places the abduction in Villa Soldati and the torture in a clandestine centre it does not name. Irish Embassy staff took prompt action that helped save them both, and the Argentine foreign ministry itself credits Irish diplomats with courage and efficiency in protecting their citizens during the dictatorship. A 1978 document released by the US State Department says he was severely mistreated under interrogation and deported in December 1976, and that his account appeared in Amnesty International's March 1977 report on Argentina. The Commission recorded that he was released through Irish government influence and that Cabrera's fate was then unknown.

Rice was reunited with Cabrera in 1984, was laicised in 1985 and married her. He was a founding member of FEDEFAM, which supports families of the disappeared, and its executive secretary from 1981 to 1987, and from 1992 national coordinator of the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights. University College Cork gave him an honorary doctorate of laws on 6 June 2008. He died of a heart attack in July 2010, aged 64, and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin paid tribute. The Irish Times and UCC accounts have him buried in Buenos Aires, while a Wikipedia account says he died in Miami. A chapel space at the former ESMA is named the Espacio Patrick Rice; President Higgins visited it in 2012.