Authors: Noël Browne
Hartnett and MacBride were complex characters. As a psychologist, it puzzles me beyond belief that these two highly intelligent yet totally disparate personalities should have believed at any
time that they could have formed a permanent working relationship. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that here were two talented experts in different forms of political activity, each
determined to make use of the other for his personal ends.
My first close encounter with MacBride was a surprise to me as it has been, no doubt, to many people before and since. Seán MacBride will always excite curiosity and interest on entering
a room. Of medium height, round-shouldered, he looked frail, indeed positively consumptive. But when he stayed near us in Connemara during an Attlee-Noel Baker visit in 1949, he was seen when
swimming to have a surprisingly powerfully-built body. He appeared always as the ‘well dressed lawyer’, wearing conservative, dark, well-cut suits. Overall he had a gaunt, cadaverous
appearance and his sallow complexion gave him a Mediterranean look. His curved crescent-shaped nose suggested a distinctly Middle Eastern appearance, and left an impression of foreignness. He could
have modelled for a powerful Epstein head of a man who had suffered much. The mouth was well-shaped, thin-lipped, and obstinate — a dangerous man to cross! His rare smile was a momentary
muscular response, as used by a well-mannered diplomat; it did not infuse a sense of warmth, nor was it ever completely reassuring.
To the Irish electorate, Seán MacBride was the unknown mysterious figure. He had all the personal charisma of the ex-prisoner legendary gunman ‘on the run’, who was also the
son of an executed martyr to the cause of Irish Republicanism, and the notorious Maud Gonne MacBride. What an impeccable list of credentials for a leader in the
Boy’s Own
world of
Irish public life. Though a forbidding-looking figure, he was a man of much personal charm, and impeccable drawing-room manners, reserved for whomsoever he wished to impress.
As I came to know him better, he seemed to me to be an insecure person, a product, no doubt, of his disturbed and turbulent upbringing in his Paris home. Earlier writings by Fenichel and more
recent studies by the psychoanalyst Victor Wolfenstein on men such as MacBride have quoted the ‘effects of a long absence of the parent in childhood.’
There were few of us with whom Seán MacBride seemed to make close friendships. I certainly did not. Then, neither do I make lasting friendships easily. I have often wondered if he had
ever been a close friend of anyone. The unwary, of whom I was one, looked in vain at him for the swaggering, Sean Keating Prototypical Republican ‘broth of a boy’ man on the run. I
confess to having been finally floored by the broken English but fluent French-speaking, rabid Irish Republican with an aristocratic half-English background.
Maud Gonne MacBride, his English mother, once showed me a photograph of Seán as a child over which, for all to see, she had written ‘Man of Destiny.’ His later campaign for
peace, following her death, is hard to reconcile with his former violent lifestyle. Did he wish to redeem that promise which, over-optimistically, his mother had inscribed on her young
child’s photograph? To what extent was the powerful and dominating personality of this notorious rebel mother responsible for his earlier career of violence? Was Seán MacBride
dominated by her either through fear or through love? Was it that, subsequently deprived of all political power — he had lost his Cabinet post, his Dáil seat and his party — he
was left with no choice but to play peace-maker? In such matters Seán was a particularly versatile performer.
On the occasion of Mr Attlee’s visit, we visited Kylemore Abbey and were greeted by the Abbess. There was a sudden movement beside me from Seán MacBride. For a moment I believed
that he had been overcome by some sort of weakness and was about to collapse forward, flat on his face, on the floor. Instead, with the ease and grace of a practised nobleman at the Court of the
Sun King at Versailles, he slid forward on one knee and gently, slowly and deferentially, bent his head to kiss the ring of office on the delicate white hand held out to him. With equal grace and
timing, she graciously submitted her hand to him for his courtly gesture. Pleasantly surprised, I watched the charming
pas de deux
being performed before my eyes. I simply shook hands with
the Abbess in the conventional way, and admired his capacity for the theatricals.
Clann na Poblachta had its remote origins in the 1922 split in the republican movement. Following Eamon de Valera’s eventual entry into the Dáil in 1927, a section of the Republican
Army continued to oppose what they claimed to be his betrayal of true republicanism. Seán MacBride had been a prominent member of that organisation throughout its years of anti-state
subversion and violence, at least until the late 1930s. Because of repeated, often farcical, failures, betrayals by informers and the ferocity of de Valera’s reprisals, the IRA realised that
with the defeat of Hitler, which they regretted, there was no hope of defeating de Valera. This led them to redirect their energies into building a political movement on the strong national network
of support they already had in the Prisoners’ Aid Committees.
As nearly always in Irish public life, the electorate was disillusioned with its politicians. They had offered nothing but unemployment, much human distress, and mass emigration. Virtually any
new political party would have been welcomed. There were also deep divisions among the normally pro-Fianna Fáil teachers, because of de Valera’s refusal to give in to their salary
claims; they were ‘on strike’. There was widespread discontent. As a doctor, I shared that discontent; I was especially unhappy about general medical needs and the virtually nonexistent
tuberculosis eradication programme. So without knowing very much about Clann na Poblachta, I welcomed it, all else having failed to give results. There were many of my age with a general radical
outlook who were weary of the gross incompetence of a succession of civil war generation politicians. If Clann na Poblachta were not quite what we were looking for, then we could work to make it
so.
By the creation of a new concept of multi-party government, Clann na Poblachta was to end the sixteen years’ long hegemony of Fianna Fáil under de Valera, but its effect on the
deeply conservative Fine Gael party was to give it new and vigorous life. This development was gloatingly summed up for me by a Fine Gael cabinet colleague, James Dillon, whom I met one day in 1948
returning from the Mansion House where the Fine Gael Party were holding their annual Árd Fheis, shortly after the formation of the first coalition. ‘Last year’, he thundered,
‘because Fine Gael was on its last legs in the country, it would have been possible for us to have held our Árd Fheis in Powers Hotel. This year, the Mansion House is full to the door
with loyal members of the Fine Gael Party.’
Each of us saw Clann na Poblachta as answering our own special needs. The ex-IRA men simply wanted an end to partition and a united Ireland. I wanted our health services restructured. Jack
McQuillan, another radical, hoped for a serious land and agricultural policy.
The first Clann na Poblachta statement in 1949 perpetuated the tradition of an influential leader class in a two-class Catholic state. Hartnett must have had some influence in the acceptance of
this statement, if not in its preparation. Since the formation of the state in 1922 a fundamental compromise with Unionist Protestants would have meant a compromise with rigid doctrine
Rome-dictated religious and political beliefs. A clearly-stated socialist manifesto from the young party, as with Saor Eire in the 1930s, would have meant its instant condemnation by the
church.
The party’s Árd Fheis failed to establish a properly structured organisation, with clearly defined radical, social and economic policies. It merely emphasised the party’s
Utopian woolliness and reflected MacBride’s tenuous understanding of political, economic and philosophical problems. For instance, under social services the party promised that ‘a
national monetary authority will be established, whose function will be to create currency and credit for the economic needs of full employment, and full production, and to provide credits, free of
interest, for full employment, and national development’. Clearly the printing presses, at least, would be busy.
Section five went on: ‘the means of production and distribution of commodities, essential to the life of the people, shall be so organised and controlled as to ensure a fair
distribution.’ This was a worthy platitude, no more.
Following MacBride’s by-election win in Dublin South Central in 1947, de Valera called a snap general election in the following February, 1948.
Hartnett was chosen by MacBride to mastermind strategy; as Director of Elections he was given authority to determine day-to-day tactics for the campaign. Since none of us new radicals had had
any previous political experience, we depended on his political judgement. Hartnett’s association with Clann na Poblachta dated only from the end of the negotiating period that led to its
formation.
Whatever about Seán MacBride’s political inexperience, which was comparable to my own, he knew enough to welcome Hartnett’s advice as an experienced political campaigner. They
were to be closely associated; until shortly after the formation of the first coalition government, Hartnett even lived in the tiny lodge at the entrance to the drive leading to the MacBride family
mansion at Roebuck House.
My first dealings with Seán MacBride had occurred when travelling by boat and train to London in late 1947. Hartnett had sought to honour his promise to our late mutual friend Harry
Kennedy to provide an efficient tuberculosis service in the republic. Using the influence which he had at that time with MacBride, Hartnett had this included as a priority issue in the new
party’s election statement. Because of my special knowledge of the subject, I was chosen to travel with MacBride and Hartnett to Ealing Studios in London, where Liam O’Leary had
organised the making of a Clann na Poblachta film by Brendan Stafford showing the need for political change in Ireland. It outlined the broad strategy needed to bring about these changes. I was to
speak on the subject of our defective health services, with special reference to tuberculosis. It was an effective and enlightened effort in the political education of an electorate whose politics
were of the crudest emotive civil war tribal variety.
The film showed the suffering and poverty in which the mass of our people, especially in city tenements, were living; high unemployment, forced emigration, widespread uncontrolled tuberculosis.
In the cities there was a very high death-rate for infants in their first years of life, from infantile gastro-enteritis caused by dirty milk and dirty vessels. There was no efficient health
service to cope with all this distress. The inertia of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in providing a service for these mainly preventable diseases was obvious in every aspect of life at that
time.
The film is still extant and its merits can be verified. Though its portrayal of life in Ireland at the time was limited in its scope, it was without doubt fair comment. It well justified a
wider circulation than it received. Because of censorship we had to be content with showing it on the derelict gable walls of the city’s dance halls, tenements, and other centres.
Following de Valera’s call for an election, I was immediately nominated as Clann na Poblachta candidate for Dublin South-East. Partially disabled by tuberculosis as I already was, I took a
serious risk in standing for election because of the hardship involved in a mid-February election in this challenging three-seat constituency, which had John Costello, the Taoiseach-to-be, and
Seán MacEntee, Minister for Finance for Fianna Fáil, as rival candidates. Phyllis with her invariable courage and selflessness, accepted the risks for both of us. (In fact I did
relapse and was infected with tuberculosis shortly after taking Ministerial office. This was not generally known.)
Though we did not know this at the time the innocents in Clann na Poblachta were to be used as political mounting blocks for others, to ease the real ‘republicans’, the ex-IRA, into
Leinster House. My function in Dublin South-East was to elect a long-standing member of the IRA, Donal O’Donoghue, who had been Quarter-Master General to MacBride in the 1930s. But he polled
a mere five hundred votes. It was O’Donoghue’s practice to turn up impeccably dressed at the street corners where our meetings were held, with an expression of resigned acceptance on
his face as though he had been beaten into it. Our platform was an unprepossessing coal lorry. O’Donoghue would stand there incongruously in his expensive-looking brown trilby hat and
spotlessly clean yellow chamois gloves, gingerly holding at the ready a folded black silk umbrella. He was a diffident apologetic man, and an unlikely member of a guerilla army.
The ‘army’ policy for us was well summed-up by a tough and ruthless party apparatchik named Michael A. Kelly. Unlike O’Donoghue, Kelly had a lurid record of violent underground
military activities in the IRA. As General Secretary of Clann na Poblachta, he stood for election in Roscommon in 1948. He was obsessively ambitious. In one short phrase he summed up our role in
Clann na Poblachta: ‘with McQuillan’s boots, and my brains’, Kelly confided to a friend in Galway, ‘I’ll be elected in Roscommon.’ Happily McQuillan, who had
been a county footballer and an all-Ireland medal holder, was easily elected instead, and was to become probably the most valuable and talented of all the deputies elected for Clann na Poblachta,
or any other party.
I had no experience of public speaking, but fortunately I had five enthusiastic and experienced election workers. Tommy Moran introduced me to the delicate art of the door-to-door canvass: truly
impressive are the manners and patience shown to all politicians equally by the Dublin electorate. George Lawlor, my Director of Elections, had been a fully active member of a Republican Army
active service unit. He had become a serious-minded, well-read socialist politician and Marxist, and is still a close friend of mine. It was George who first initiated me in the fearsome ordeal of
standing up in public and addressing my fellow citizens. Cait Clancy, who has since died, was an Irish-speaking teacher in her late fifties from Co Waterford. Throughout the atrocious wintry
weather, Cait with her folded umbrella sat bravely on our platform. She was well-known and respected among teachers in the Gaelic revival movement, and gave me respectability in that sector of
Irish nationalism. ‘Pa’ Woods was a good-humoured, kindly, somewhat cynical national school teacher, and an experienced political worker. Finally there was a most important supporter,
Mick Dowling. Mick’s asset was a lorry, which he generously put at our disposal. Mercifully, he spoke very little, since he still hankered after the ‘great little equaliser’ as a
solution to the Northern question. Unlike others of that ilk, Mick was apt to say so publicly.