Authors: Noël Browne
The consultant made only one comment to my colleague, who was in charge of the hospital: ‘I would get rid of him if I were you’. Simply because he had spoken freely and truthfully to
one of those responsible for the discrimination between rich and poor in Irish medical care, this sick man was to be denied any treatment whatever. It was a particularly callous decision to send
him home to die because it put at risk his wife and small daughter. Fortunately I arranged that he be re-admitted the next day, with the tacit approval, I believe, of my medical colleague, whom I
did not consult.
The story has a bleak ending. Because of the inadequacy of the surgical and other facilities at Newcastle, Harry, through the generosity of his fellow journalists, was sent to a London surgeon
at Brompton Hospital. Unhappily, his condition was already too advanced, and he died shortly after his operation.
A
FTER THE war, though a secure, well paid and professionally rewarding job in the English health service was open to us, Phyllis
and I chose to return to Ireland to work towards some form of socialised medicine. In pursuance of this aim, I entered politics in 1947 on the recommendation of two politically experienced friends,
Noel Hartnett and Harry Kennedy. Through Hartnett, whom I had met when he visited Harry Kennedy at Newcastle, I was to be introduced to Seán MacBride, Clann na Poblachta and Irish public
life. I felt the Clann na Poblachta party was the only political option open to me, as the three main political parties were conservative, and the Labour Party said that my membership would not be
welcome.
MacBride and Hartnett had been involved as defence lawyers in a number of Republican trials. Their relationship developed so that in the Law Library, when MacBride appeared, it was certain that
Hartnett would be there, two paces behind him. He became known as ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’.
Their most important republican trial was their appearance at a coroner’s inquest into the death of a young republican named McCaughey who had died on hunger-strike at Portlaoise jail.
(Later, as Minister for Health, it was one of my first official acts to inspect McCaughey’s cell deep underground, a truly awful place in which to die, hungry or not). At the conclusion of
the inquest, Seán MacBride asked ‘You would not keep a dog in conditions like that, would you, doctor?’ The doctor declined at first to answer. Following persistent questioning
he finally agreed. Though young McCaughey did not survive to enjoy it, this was considered to be a victory for the Republican cause.
Hartnett was the Junior Counsel in the case. He was to suffer because of public revulsion at the disclosures at this inquest of what it was like to live and die in one of de Valera’s
jails. Shortly after the case he was sacked from his post in Radio Éireann: it appears that, in a moment of vindictive reprisal, de Valera had convinced himself that Hartnett was a security
risk. With all his family, Hartnett had been a lifelong de Valera admirer, and was shocked by the pettiness of the act. After all, was he not honouring the universal code of offering a defence
which the legal profession must give any client? For this and other reasons, Hartnett decided to resign from Fianna Fáil. He told me that when he saw the first cheque for £1,000 from
Denis Guiney, a shopkeeper, on the table at Fianna Fáil headquarters, he realised it was no longer the republican party he had joined.
Hartnett was well skilled in the intrigues and intricacies of fighting and winning elections, learned over the years at the highest level in Fianna Fáil. With widespread social
discontent, economic stagnation, high unemployment, the teachers’ strike and unprecedented emigration, he realised that the time was ripe for the formation of a new political grouping in
Ireland.
As Seán MacEntee was to disclose, Fianna Fáil knew of republican links with the Nazis, and MacBride had been a lawyer and one-time chief of staff of the IRA. It is difficult to
believe that neither Hartnett nor MacBride knew of the links between the republican movement and the Nazis. How could these two men have concluded that it would be possible to found a social,
democratic political organisation on the powerfully anti-democratic forces of the republican army?
Hartnett had much personal charm. In spite of the episcopal ban, he had as a Catholic chosen to go to Trinity on a Kerry County Council scholarship, in its time a dangerous thing to do. He was
to become a distinguished scholar, winning the Berkeley Gold Medal for oratory. He was an Irish language revivalist in the early days but, as with so many others, was later repelled by the
opportunism and jobbery associated with the movement. By joining with Seán MacBride to form Clann na Poblachta, he had made sacrifices of his own and his family’s treasured personal
and political associations with Fianna Fáil. Above all he suffered a personal loss, the friendship of Eamon de Valera. Lemass is reported to have said that looking down the table at the
Fianna Fáil executive, of which Hartnett and Erskine Childers were members, it was Hartnett rather than Childers that he expected would join a Fianna Fáil cabinet.
Hartnett’s disenchantment with Fianna Fáil had more complex origins than his sacking from Radio Éireann by de Valera. His loss of enthusiasm for de Valera paralleled the
change in the intensity of Fianna Fáil’s republicanism. This profound transformation into conservative sectarian nationalism was enshrined in the lamentable provisions of the 1937
Constitution. Hartnett used to give two illustrations of internal conflicts in Fianna Fáil during this period.
In the mid-1930s, it appears, Seán Lemass had made a speech in Cahir shortly after Fianna Fáil’s assumption of power, pounding out the simple grating truth — the
romantic struggle to liberate Ireland is over; we must forget our old grievances, bind up our wounds, and get on with the work of building a new and a prosperous Ireland. These sentiments dismayed
many of the old soldiers, inflamed by memories of their real and imagined heroics in the national struggle.
A call was made to discipline Lemass. Hartnett, who sided with Lemass, noted that de Valera sat through the long and heated executive debate and made no attempt to rescue Lemass from the old
soldiers snapping at his heels. Late in the night, de Valera proposed to adjourn the debate. Lemass, who had sat silent, spoke up for the first time and said, ‘No, finish the debate. Make
your minds up.’ In the end, after a close vote, he survived. What was clear to Hartnett was that while de Valera had feared no rival since Collins, he did not disapprove of Lemass’s
power in the party being visibly curbed.
Hartnett himself was involved in the second incident. During a Dáil debate in the early 1940s, a seemingly placatory speech was made by Seán MacEntee about the Fine Gael party. He
seemed to express doubts about the validity of the anti-treaty ‘republican’ cause and even to sympathise with Kevin O’Higgins. Hartnett was a traditional Irish republican whose
family had been burnt out in the civil war, and it appeared to him, and to those who supported him, that MacEntee’s speech was a betrayal of the Republic. In addition, the name of
O’Higgins had been mentioned, and not in revulsion. Was there not the bloody reality of seventy-seven republican comrades executed on O’Higgins’s orders, without trial?
A move was made by Hartnett to have MacEntee disciplined. Once again, de Valera played the non-committal sphinx. The debate went against the republicans. Towards its end Erskine Childers,
embarrassed by the anger and hatred expressed, stood up to walk out. Hartnett stopped him, as he attempted to pass, and pleaded, ‘Stay for the vote, Erskine, you must know it is your
father’s name we are vindicating.’ Childers passed on, and out of the room. Hartnett noted that de Valera made no attempt to take sides, or to defend the republican position.
Hartnett was probably the only member of the leadership of Clann na Poblachta with a wide academic training. The army sector of Clann na Poblachta, including MacBride, began their orthodox
political lives virtually on the same day as the rest of us beginners. Whatever else divided us, we had in common this dependence on Hartnett. Hartnett was a small plump pink-faced figure, under
five feet in height, Pickwickian in shape. He had fine thin auburn hair, which normally grew as it would. On formal occasions a quickly wetted comb was briskly produced to induce a transverse Kerry
‘quiff’. This lay across the top of his forehead; the rest, untouched, lay in continued chaos behind. He himself frequently but tenderly ridiculed the unquestionable ugliness of his
face. Its most notable features were his two small menacing flinty blue eyes, and his disproportionately large nose, which gave him a rich, mellifluous speaking voice. In repose, his mouth went
straight across his face, like two razor blades.
Hartnett’s smile was used in its strictly primordial social role, ‘to reassure a hostile tribe’, and was rarely sincere. Like a bullet shattering a plate glass window, his face
could splinter into that blazing smile. Its effect was instantaneous, disarming and bewildering.
In spite of his fine mind and academic training, Hartnett showed much of the confused sentimentality and spontaneous romantic nationalism of the Kerry republican. He had a natural gift for
moving platform oratory in the old oratorical style of rhetoric and phrasing. He also had his weaknesses, a dangerous one being a petulant intolerance and impatience of dissent with his opinions or
prejudices. While this mellowed with time, there was more of the didact and authoritarian than the democrat to Hartnett. I have listened to him harangue a civic guard who quite rightly stopped us
for a minor traffic offence. From behind his customary poisonously-smelling Woodbine, drumming an angry tattoo on his quivering knee with pudgy heavily-nicotined fingers, Hartnett complained
haughtily, ‘Garda, I would have you know that I am a member of the Irish Bar.’ Not for the first time puzzled by his contradictions, I wondered how Hartnett could conclude that being a
member of the legal profession could qualify him to break the law. Hartnett once criticised McQuillan and myself in the Dáil because we had ridiculed the guards of honour, wigs and gowns of
the Law Courts. Neither he nor his fellow republicans have ever chosen to discard these silly trappings of our colonial past. On being challenged at a meeting in Beggar’s Bush to socialise
the lawyers now that he had decided to socialise medicine, Hartnett instantly sprang to their defence and called out ‘hands off the law.’
I recall canvassing with Hartnett in the early 1950s at a city centre block of flats, Oliver Bond House. It was a winter election, the wind cold and gusty off the river. The rain plopped down
from the eaves onto the stained frilly edges of his grey trilby hat, onto his face and down the side of his bulbous nose, from which, fascinated, I watched it trickle off, seemingly unnoticed by
him into his mouth. I was reminded of one of those unpredictable amusement arcade pinball games. Water soaked his overcoat which, being off the peg and ill-fitting, came down over his shoulders on
each side, and trickled down onto his lumpy, uncleaned, good quality ‘reverend mother’ black leather shoes, soaking his obviously uncared-for, accordion-pleated trousers.
We passed on slowly and mournfully, followed by poorly nourished, ill-clad, thumb-sucking, begging youngsters. They appeared to come out of the hallways, the doors, the liftshafts, under,
through and over the balconies to harass and torment him. Dying for a smoke, Hartnett was no child-lover, and did not pretend to be. No votes, so no smiles for them. To me wryly through his teeth
he muttered, as he delicately tipped the ash of his Woodbine, held as a lady holds her teacup, finger fanned out, ‘Let’s make it a part of our party platform, Noel, to employ a fleet of
helicopters to fly over all the working class flat areas of Dublin, seven days a week for a year, to start with, and shower them with contraceptives’. He was not smiling. We stumbled on.
Towards the end of his life, Hartnett became disillusioned by the sectarian bigotry of Irish society. For him the classical Greek writers had already spoken for all of us, and for all time. He
spoke of ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water,’ a Trinity intellectual’s classic snobbish summary of the communist manifesto and Lenin’s socialist revolution. He could
ignore the disagreeable features of Plato’s republic with its elitist assumptions; no doubt he presumed his own membership of that elite. He told me, ‘The day will come, Noel, when we
will have to seek refuge from these petty bigots here, and look for justice North of the border.’ In disgust, he once protested that we should all ‘get out of this inhospitable
windswept island, it’s only fit for the seagulls.’
Hartnett had many of the characteristics of the leading figure in a story he liked to tell about Kerry republicanism. The scene is a wild isolated village on a dark wet winter’s night in
south Kerry. The ‘republicans’ have been excommunicated by the Catholic Church and are on the run. The small church is just about to conclude Benediction. The front door is thrown open.
Seven unkempt, weary-looking men, armed with the usual strange assortment of rifles, shotguns, and pistols, stand there deferentially with caps in their hands. The leader halts the service with a
shout, and strides up to the altar rails, followed by his guerillas. Then, brave fellow, he calls on the priest and congregation for a decade of the rosary for the soul of the man lying in the
coffin in the small side chapel, a republican comrade who had been killed in action. Republicans at that time were denied by the Church their last cherished ritual of prayers for the dead. Armed as
he is, he has no difficulty in getting the ‘Hail Marys’, with the concluding ‘May the Lord have mercy on his soul’.
Satisfied, he smartly calls his men to order, ‘about turn’ and out the door. The last man to leave, he swaggers after his men through the door and, as he does so, turns on his heel,
snaps his fingers in the priest’s face, and calls out, defiantly, ‘Now you can turn me into a canary if you want to, Father.’ He was a typical superstitious Irish republican, who
sought to ridicule the ‘druid’, yet, in spite of his braggadacio, he was both respectful and fearful enough to address the priest as ‘Father’ and ask for his prayers.
Hartnett himself was to die with all the rites of the church to help him on his way.