Richard J. Hayes

Richard James Hayes (; born 1902, died 1976) was an Irish code-breaker during World War II and was Director of the National Library of Ireland. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and Trinity College Dublin.

Cryptologist It's not clear how Hayes, who joined the National Library with a degree in languages from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was identified by army intelligence as a codebreaker. Colonel Dan Bryan, head of Ireland's G2 intelligence service, made the initial approaches to the newly appointed director in 1940 when a cipher was found on the first German agent to be captured in Ireland, Wilhelm Preetz. Hayes made significant progress in breaking the code and in February 1941, at the behest of Éamon de Valera, he was given an office and three lieutenants to decode wireless messages being covertly transmitted from a house in north Dublin owned by the German legation. One of his staff was Kevin Boland, son of the then justice minister Gerald Boland. The operation was so secret that the younger Boland was instructed not to tell his father what he was doing.

Günther Schütz, a German spy interned in Ireland during the war, described him as "absolutely brilliant". As far as Schütz and the other German spies whose cells he entered during the Emergency knew, their quiet-spoken interrogator was "Captain Grey", a mysterious military figure always accompanied by another intelligence officer. Only a handful of people in G2 military intelligence knew that "Captain Grey", a second World War code breaker, was not a military man at all. and described him as Ireland's "greatest unsung hero". The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) characterised him as "a colossus of a man". During the war his own family didn't know the nature of his role with military intelligence. He may have used one of his daughter's school exercise book to decode complex German ciphers. Even Günther Schütz went to his grave in 1991 still believing that it was another man, Commandant de Butléir, who was responsible for identifying his microdot codes – the first cryptologist in the world to do so.

Schütz and Goertz Günther Schütz was dropped into Ireland on 12 March 1941 to make contact with IRA members sympathetic to the German cause and to transmit weather reports He had joined the Library in 1923 and served as Director 1940–67. During his time in the Library he made an enormous contribution to Irish bibliography, editing the following publications: Manuscript Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation. (1965) Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation: Articles in Irish Periodicals. (1970) with Brighid Ní Dhonnchadha, Clár Litridheacht na Nua-Ghaedhilge. (1938)

He also compiled the first major bilingual dictionary between Irish and a language other than English since the 1700s i.e. French

When there was a danger that the Ormonde papers might be sold and leave the country, he prevailed on the government to introduce the Documents and Pictures (Regulation of Export) Act 1945. Hayes died in 1976, leaving behind a collection of papers and manuscripts that is now catalogued in the National Library.