Authors: Noël Browne
All the regional sanatoria, the James Connolly in Dublin, Merlin Park in Galway, Sarsfield Court in Cork, were designed in the architectural section of the Department of Health under our
imaginative, infinitely patient and talented New Zealand architect Norman White and his staff. These great buildings, still serving the public, stand today as monuments to their high standard of
workmanship, design and finish. Who says that a state department cannot be creative, imaginative, and practical? Our massive hospital building programme was to lead to one of the very few occasions
in which the Republic of Ireland was paid the highest of accolades. Shortly after the completion of the building programme in the late 1950s an international jury of experts voted Ireland, with
Sweden, as ‘having the most advanced and finest hospital system in the world.’ This rare honour was barely referred to or commented on in the national press or radio. It must be assumed
that this collective silence was an act of deliberate censorship, required because the ‘discredited’ former Minister for Health was now a forgotten man on the backbenches.
Our total programme entailed a proposed expenditure of £30 million. We planned to replace all existing hospital beds, or otherwise upgrade the standard of accommodation in existing
hospitals throughout the country. The programme amounted to a total of over 7,000 new hospital beds.
Luckily, the finance needed to build so many new hospitals was available from the Hospital Sweep funds. Unlike the rest of my Cabinet colleagues, as Minister for Health I had absolute personal
control over these funds, under the Hospital Sweeps Acts, There was none of what James Dillon, Minister for Agriculture, ruefully complained of as ‘treasury control’ over spending. I
enjoyed the added advantage that all my predecessors had followed the same miserly spending on hospital building work. They spent only the income from the interest on the accumulated capital
invested from successive sweeps. This amounted to a mere £100,000, but I needed millions. The £100,000 annually could not possibly build badly-needed hospitals all over Ireland. We
decided to alter that policy radically, and proceeded to liquidate all the available assets in the Sweep funds invested. When we costed the various projects, it became obvious that we would still
not have sufficient funds to meet our needs, so I decided further to pre-empt the income expected from the fund during the following seven-year period. This permitted us to carry on the building of
all the hospitals, sanatoria, and clinics which were needed. They could be paid for as the projects matured from projected incomes of future sweepstakes. The Department of Health quickly
established the seriousness of its intent to provide eight to ten thousand beds in eight to ten years, a massive building programme unequalled before or since.
This radical departure from former spending in the Department of Health must have tested the patience of my departmental secretary, Paddy Kennedy. Our early days together were turbulent. I was
the youngest minister ever to have been appointed to a new ministry on his first day in parliament. To the apprehensive Mr Kennedy I must have appeared to be a woefully inexperienced person. I had
been appointed to the post of Minister for Health, and at the same time I was a doctor, in conflict with the accepted convention of parliamentary politics; it is preferred that the political head
of a department should not himself be involved in the speciality controlled by that department.
Further to Mr Kennedy’s worries, I had no administrative experience. I had worked as a medical officer in sanatoria in England and in Ireland. A technocrat I might be, but without any
serious administrative experience. Not surprisingly, Mr Kennedy, a mature and experienced civil servant who at one time had worked with Mr de Valera, felt apprehensive about working with his new
Minister for Health. It is probably true to say that my innocence of all that was involved was in many ways a useful cushion between myself and my intimidating new responsibilities.
I set out with many of the layman’s misconceptions about a politician’s life, and what it entailed. With the end of the cheers, flashbulbs, photos and congratulations, an early
assessment showed that there was a price to be paid.
The serious-minded Cabinet minister must work very hard. He is a departmental head and attends twice-weekly Cabinet meetings. He must meet hundreds of citizens, individually or collectively, who
wish to consult him. He undergoes the critical and trying ordeal of parliamentary work, including parliamentary questions. As a working politician, he must keep in touch with his political base in
his own constituency. Then there are his family and his children. Because of his frequent absences, they grow up with all the disadvantages of a one-parent family; family life becomes
impossible.
It was my custom to leave a chocolate biscuit under the pillow of each of our daughters when I returned late each night. Frequently, because of school on their part, or my early departure, I
might not see them throughout the whole of that day, or possibly even during that week. The chocolate biscuit was no substitute for a conscientious parent, nor was their mother’s reassurance
that ‘Noëlie is out building hospitals for sick people’. With a predictable five-day week at Newcastle, we had forged a timetable within which I could play my role as medical
officer, husband and father. That harmonious interplay of a stable two-parent home, so important in the maturation process of our two daughters Ruth (born in 1945) and Susan (born in 1949), came to
an abrupt end.
It was considered politically wise, that, as Minister for Health, I should vacate the small lodge in which we lived at the hospital. Thereafter, during my three-year period as Minister, we were
to change our rented homes five times. Ruth and Susan’s hitherto sheltered life was irreparably shattered. There were enormous mental and physical demands on my wife, forced to organise these
periodic moves on her own. For the children, there were no more seaside visits, walks and talks in the woods, picnics, swimming in the Wicklow streams. Overnight, their father had gone, had
disappeared. In this aspect of their lives all politicians make considerable unrecognised sacrifices for the sake of the public, frequently at the expense of their own families.
There were also financial implications. At that time, ministerial salaries were absurdly inadequate, based on the old convention of British parliamentary government when politicians were
propertied gentlemen with private means. A minister was paid less than his departmental secretary. Added to this was the peculiar dispensation imposed on a Clann na Poblachta minister, because of
MacBride’s belief that a minister should contribute the ministerial part of his salary to party funds. It was a measure of his ignorance of the even greater financial and social demands on a
minister over those of a deputy, heavy though these are. Since I had leave of absence from my hospital work, we were totally dependent on my Dáil salary. Far from being highly paid it was
during my period as minister that, as a family, we contracted unavoidable debts from which we were freed only twenty years later, when deputies and ministers were properly paid.
It was believed that there had been widespread abuse of ministerial cars by our predecessors; Paddy Smith was said to have brought his calves to the fair for sale in his ministerial car. A Clann
na Poblachta minister was expected to use his ministerial car exclusively for government business. This entailed greatly increased physical and financial demands on us. It was even further
increased because we had the whole country to cover and there were only two of us. I was constantly on the road, driving myself to the four corners of Ireland for party political reasons.
I recall a long, dangerous and stressful drive in the unreliable open car we then owned, all the way from Dublin to the top-most point of Donegal. The phrase used by local party workers,
‘over the Gweebarra Bridge’ is still engraved on my heart. Our journey was made in order to fight the Neil Blaney by-election, caused by the death of his father. After a hard weekend of
chapel gate meetings, we travelled back from Donegal to Dublin. There was snow on the Curlew Mountains. Because I was the only driver who could see at all where we were going, with the windscreen
lying flat on the car bonnet, I was chosen to lead the way home during the worst part of the cold, wet, wintry night of wind, rain and fog. Even if I did not suffer the dangerous threat of
tuberculosis, how could a minister carry on his difficult job throughout the following week after a weekend of such activity?
Becoming and having been a minister can distort the personality of the man or woman who is unwary. For instance, beware of becoming pompous and vain; it does happen. Ministerial protocol
demands, and I never failed to find it embarrassing, that a senior civil servant, such as Mr Kennedy, would feel bound to stand by my side, as I signed important law-enforcing documents which would
alter the lives of our fellow citizens. Mr Kennedy’s job was merely to blot my signature. This distinguished civil servant, it appears, must address me neither as ‘Mr’,
‘Deputy’, ‘Doctor,’ or even the democratic ‘Noël’, but only as ‘Minister’. The word was hissed out with the kind of reverence which the Chinese
reserve for their aged.
Happily for me, there were antidotes to this heady sense of delirious intoxication. Other than the damaged ego that follows return to one’s usually commonplace civilian ordinariness, the
ill effect rarely survived the experience. Yet, sure that within myself I had not changed in any way, I wondered at the servile transformation of so many, when it was they who had honoured me. Does
society unconsciously promote such pomposity and inflated self importance among a chosen few, so that in time, whimsically, humpty-dumpty-like it may destroy it?
There is an incongruous aid to this process of exclusivism, the mean and unimaginative substitute republican ‘magic’ devised to replace that of the old British raj. It takes the form
of a purposeless, to me at any rate, ‘laying on of hands’ ritual ar Áras an Uachtaráin. In spite of our new republican status, in the absence of a sovereign monarch our
seals of office were formally bestowed on us by the President. Having been studied by each of us for a matter of seconds, the seals were then demanded back by the President, Seán T.
O’Kelly. Even an all-Ireland finalist gets a permanent memento of his momentary glory!
I had never even been to see parliament in action. A few days before the opening of the Dáil it fell to the Deputy Secretary, Paddy Murray, to bring me over to Leinster House and, in the
privacy of the empty Dáil chamber, explain briefly parliamentary procedures. ‘This is where the government sits, over here the opposition . . . Here sits the Ceann Comhairle. This is
where the journalists sit . . . Your civil servants will sit here, so as to be of help to you.’ In a brief half-hour visit, I had to absorb the complex protocol of parliamentary debate that
later I came to know so well.
Initially, the most worrying aspect of my job as Minister was Question Time. With the exception of the incorrigible Seán MacEntee, deputies of all parties showed an unusual restraint in
deference to my newness to the job. For MacEntee, it was war to the death from the beginning. On one occasion a question was mischievously submitted to me in Irish by a Gaelic-speaking deputy,
Gerald Bartley from Connemara. Bartley well knew that because of my mainly English education I had no Irish. (Mr Kennedy had to translate even the two words ‘Aire Sláinte’ on the
first occasion I signed a legal document for him as Minister for Health.) The Fianna Fáil party wished to establish Mr MacEntee’s thesis that I was a ‘piece of flotsam’,
and an uncaring anglophile West Briton.
I decided to take a risk. Mr Kennedy, a fluent Gaelic speaker, translated the parliamentary question for me into English and then translated my reply into Irish. He kindly tutored me in the
phonetic version of the reply. On the day, miserable with fear, I presented myself in the Dáil Chamber. Having replied to a number of questions in English, difficult enough in themselves, I
came to Gerald Bartley’s question in Irish. Collecting whatever nerve is conjured up by us on these occasions I spoke my reply in phonetic Irish to a silent and surprised Dáil chamber.
I then sat down. To his credit and my intense relief Bartley made no attempt to show up my ignorance. He asked no supplementaries.
In deference to the fact that a good number of our people at that time spoke Irish, and as a courtesy to them should they wish to speak to me in that form, I set out to learn the language. Here
I was fortunate to have the willing help of Seosaph O Cadhain from Connemara. Seosaph attended three days a week at the Department of Health or at any convenient venue to both of us, sometimes at
his home in Crumlin. I spent whatever free weekends I had in Connemara with him. There I met another distinguished Gaelic scholar, Seán O Conghaile of Cnoc. During my many weekends in
Connemara, and later on all our family vacations there, we lived with Seán and his hospitable wife Máire. Not alone did I learn to speak the language but, since Seán’s
father was still living, I was privileged to encounter the unique ambience of our ancient ethos and culture. Lamentably this culture has now become virtually extinguished.
To speak the language became one of my most powerful private ambitions. It was then that with my wife Phyllis and our two daughters I came to know Connemara and its people. We have made it our
chosen home before anywhere else we know. It is sad that as a nation we have abandoned hope that our people will now ever speak their own language. The language revival was bound up with national
prosperity. An intelligent parent, at least one out of three of whose children must emigrate to England, could not be unduly concerned about learning a language which for them would become an
unspoken language in the country of their adoption.
One of my first acts as Minister for Health was to remove the special preference for Irish speakers in medical appointments outside the Gaeltacht areas. However, I believe that we were the first
government department invariably to print our advertisements, educational and information literature bilingually. We were the first government department to make bilingual educational films for
schools and other interested groups. Our booklets and leaflets were invariably bilingual. Finally, I was proud to be awarded the Fáinne by Seosaph O Cadhain.