The failure was attributed to prejudicial comments made in Parliament by his father, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Mates, MP, which implied that Ryan was a terrorist.
The same story, together with a report on the Russian economy, won Mates a silver medal at the 35th Annual Film & Television Festival of New York City.
His many assignments have numbered Kosovo, where he was during the NATO invasion of the country; former Yugoslavia where he covered the 1996 refugee crisis; Moscow during President Yeltsin's attempt to put down the uprising in Chechnya; and Rwanda where he reported on the Central African Republic 's genocidal civil war.
As the only television journalist left in the capital Kigali in 1994, Mates watched the city fall to the rebel army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Just before covering the war in Rwanda, Mates had been in South Africa reporting on the first-ever democratic elections in the country, which culminated in Nelson Mandela's inauguration as President.
[citation needed] In 2001 Mates played a key role in ITV News coverage of the September 11 attacks, reporting from New York and Washington.