Authors: Noël Browne
This was to be the pattern of future charges. One of the ex-IRA group, for instance, would say that I had confided in him that I would bring down Seán MacBride as leader of the party or
that I would pick a row with the church of Rome, so as to further my political career, palpably absurd suggestions. It was claimed that I had made offensively critical remarks about the republican
army and their political immaturity. When I denied these and other damaging charges, the individual making the charge would turn to an accomplice, and ask for corroboration: ‘You were there
on Saturday the 15th, you heard — ’ and then he would repeat whatever the charge happened to be. There would be immediate confirmation of the charge from the second planted witness.
MacBride read out what purported to be a verbatim account of our conversation at the Russell Hotel. It has been suggested that MacBride, during his visits to the toilet, took copious notes of
our conversation. To my knowledge he took no notes at the dinner table and I cannot recollect that he left the table more than once. He was not a competent shorthand writer. The purpose of the
alleged verbatim account was to assert my intention to usurp the leadership of the party. The suggestion that the aspirant to a leadership ‘coup’ would calmly forewarn the party leader
over dinner in a hotel is palpably absurd.
What did we really discuss at that dinner? Speaking to MacBride very quietly and with great seriousness, I had made the point that he and his family had suffered much for his beliefs; it was
obvious that he was seriously committed to a united Ireland. I went on to say that if Clann na Poblachta and the government submitted to the demands of the Roman Catholic church it would be
seriously damaging to that cause. I warned him that I intended to publicise to the full any such interference by the church, should it occur, in Cabinet affairs.
I warned that if he and I could not agree to preserve the health scheme the split between us would be obvious to all. In these circumstances the party must suffer, divided as it would be between
those who admired him for his work as Minister for External Affairs, and those few, probably belonging to my generation, who believed that I had succeeded in improving the health service. In reply,
Seán turned to me and said, ‘Noël, what have you done in the Department of Health?’
MacBride then mischievously accused me of having ridiculed the republicans of the party during that conversation. Especially malicious was his claim that I had named Jim Killeen as a
particularly useless party member. Killeen had been a sincere, committed member of the republican army, and had been imprisoned for a number of years. He was a man of the highest ideals, respected
and deservedly well liked by all of us in the party. Much as I disagreed with Jim’s belief in violence, I greatly admired his single-minded integrity, and had every reason to believe that he
was a good friend of mine. Whatever I might have said about any member of the party, under no circumstances would I denigrate, ridicule, or criticise Jim Killeen, one of the few of them whom I
whole-heartedly respected. The charge had been made with the obvious purpose of alienating me from the executive. Not alone did I lose Jim’s support; his old comrades were angered as well. Of
the many charges made against me that night, I will always recall this particular charge of having belittled Killeen as possibly the most hurtful of all.
There was only one charge made by MacBride to which I pleaded guilty unrepentantly. This was that once, in a state of exasperation, I had described Bill Norton as a ‘fake Labour
leader’. Close personal experience of Norton in Cabinet had made this clear. The charge was a measure of the deviousness of MacBride’s mind; by quoting this criticism, he sought to
discredit me with those who were in sympathy with the Labour Party.
Then came what was surely the strangest charge of all. MacBride’s alleged intention had been to implement Tone’s plea that ‘there should be neither Catholic, Protestant or
Dissenter, but the common name of Irishman’. He had claimed that appointing the ex-British army officer and Belfast Protestant, Denis Ireland, to the Senate seat would unite orange and green,
Protestant and Catholic, peacefully in a united Ireland. He now set out to show the executive that I was not sufficiently hostile to the Protestant minority in the republic. He accused me of having
been politically foolish in allowing myself ‘to be photographed in public shaking hands with a Protestant Archbishop’. He claimed that this act of mine ‘had done great damage to
the party, and to the coalition government’. The reason he gave for this petty-minded charge was ‘that the photograph of myself and the Protestant archbishop shaking hands, had been
widely published in the national press’.
What had happened was this. As Minister for Health I had laid the foundation stone for a badly-needed infants’ unit at the Rotunda Hospital, which would act as a highly-skilled emergency
flying squad of trained nursing and medical personnel for Dublin mothers. In providing the unit, the department was filling a serious gap in the maternity and child welfare service. The Protestant
Archbishop, Dr Barton, was the Chairman of the Rotunda Hospital Board, a kindly and gentle man, completely apolitical. However, that I had fraternised with the Protestant Archbishop was one more
black mark against me in the eyes of Seán MacBride, and of that executive of grotesquely miscalled ‘republicans’.
Recently released Cabinet papers reveal a pitiful attempt by Seán MacBride subsequently to ingratiate himself with Archbishop Barton. It appears that MacBride wrote a letter to the
Archbishop in an attempted ‘explanation’ for his bigoted remark. He protests that he made his remark because I had confided in him my intention, ‘by using the Protestant against
the Catholic doctors, to split the medical profession on religious lines’. Leaving aside the fact that the majority of Protestant consultants were as bitterly opposed to the new health scheme
as their Catholic colleagues, MacBride made no attempt to clarify the way in which my alleged strategy was to work. Because of de Valera’s policy against employing Protestant doctors in the
public service, it is very likely that among the 800 dispensary doctors on whom the scheme was to be based there were probably no Protestants at all.
Slowly my onetime respected position with the executive was undermined at this trial. Wild charges, no matter how improbable, eroded my support. I marvelled at the systematic disintegration of
the Noël Browne that I knew, happening through my ears and before my eyes, and I impotent to halt it. One after the other, genuinely embarrassed friends who had been well disposed towards me
adopted a new attitude of mild suspicion and incredulity, turning to active hostility. It was hard to blame them, listening to the arguments offered to them and the ‘proof’ of those
arguments. They heard a cleverly pieced-together picture of an arrogant, personally offensive, disloyal, egocentric power-mad individual. This grotesque caricature was a distortion of the Noël
Browne they knew. They knew that I had always been accessible to them; the visible effects of our work in the Department of Health could be seen all over Ireland. As John Whyte had written in
Church and State in Modern Ireland:
‘Dr Browne’s energetic efforts paid off. By July 1950, he was able to announce that his emergency bed programme was almost complete. Two
thousand extra beds had been provided in a little over two years for TB patients. The TB death rate came tumbling down. These were spectacular achievements.’ Professor Whyte concluded:
‘Of all the members of the inter-party government, Dr Browne seemed to produce the most in the way of definite results.’
Desperate attempts to save the party came from all over the room, to avoid the inevitable split. MacBride’s main charge had been disloyalty to the leader. I had denied this charge. There
was an appeal for a vote of loyalty to the leader. In reply, I repeatedly asked both the genuinely concerned and those with mischievous intent whether this vote of loyalty meant that I would be
compelled to accept the Church of Rome’s right to tell our government to drop the health scheme. Did this motion, if passed, mean that as their Minister for Health I must then introduce the
means test into the mother and child health scheme? If their answer to this question was yes, my answer was ‘I won’t support the motion’.
As the night wore on, I adopted my own formula for survival. I would not promise uncritical, unquestioned loyalty to any man. Men change, principles are constant. This became the final fixed
theme on my answers to the many questions, motions, and resolutions put to me. Until the Oireachtas changed the law which empowered me, as their Minister for Health, to introduce a free
no-means-test mother and child health scheme, I would and must implement that law.
Martin O Cadhain, who at one time had been an active member of the republican army council and had also been one of de Valera’s internees in the Curragh, told me later that on reading
about the trial in the newspapers, he was reminded of his time in the republican movement. When a member of the republican army was courtmartialed on a capital charge because of his disloyalty to
the army or to the leader, or because of alleged informer activities, there was an eerie substitute for the ritual black cap of the civil courts. The president of the court would deliberately tap
out his cigarette into the ashtray in front of him, while steadily eyeing the unfortunate wretch before the court. This Neroesque gesture signalled to the executioners present that the victim had
been found guilty of the stated charge. The man was then taken out, allowed to make his peace with God, and summarily shot. Martin consoled me: ‘If that trial had taken place, and you a
member of the republican army, you would have lost the back of your skull on the top of the Feather Bed mountains’.
The vote was taken by the Clann na Poblachta executive. With three honourable exceptions, i.e. Jack McQuillan, Con Lucey and Dermot Corcoran, the executive voted to support MacBride’s
condemnation of their Minister for Health. There was no need for MacBride publicly to act as personal political executioner on his former colleague. The executive meeting had taken the matter
conveniently out of his hands. He could now play the role of democratic party leader, reluctantly enforcing the wishes of his executive to sack his Cabinet colleague.
Meanwhile there was a surprise intervention by a trade union delegation. There was a possibility that the ‘nominal charge’ peace proposal might be acceptable to the hierarchy. This
formula represented a compromise: in order to put herself in benefit, the mother simply paid a ten-shilling fee. I was satisfied with such a settlement. I did not wish to bring down a government,
but I did want to save a fine health scheme. I made it clear that if we could come to a reasonable compromise, we would do so, but the no-means-test principle would have to be left intact.
MacBride, impatient to be rid of me, called for my resignation before any further action could be taken. It is a significant indication of the class origins of the Cabinet that while willing to
accept the dictat of the bishops, they were indignant that they should be asked seriously to consider this attempt at mediation by the trade union movement.
On 10 April 1951, MacBride delivered to me personally a letter demanding that I resign my post as Minister for Health forthwith. He had thus ensured the collapse of the Coalition government, his
own political death warrant and the disappearance of Clann na Poblachta.
The motion of loyalty had read ‘If the leader of the party deems it necessary to call for the resignation or removal of Dr Browne from the government, he will have the loyal support of the
National Executive.’ It was in accordance with this authority that he now requested my resignation. I complied with that request. Mr Costello later asserted, ‘If MacBride had not done
so, I would have.’
My resignation as Minister for Health was the first time in the history of the state that a Cabinet minister had chosen to sacrifice office in order to show publicly that the Irish government
process was an elaborate sham.
In spite of their best efforts to conceal this fraudulent reality of mock power, the Cabinet’s influence and submission to Rome was proven without doubt by Cabinet ministers themselves in
their own correspondence, behaviour and speeches. It was my decision to publish such confidential state correspondence, to end the fiction of representative democracy in Ireland. That decision, I
well knew, ended any prospect I might have had of ever again serving as a Cabinet minister in an Irish government. I was pilloried for my failure to respect cabinet and church confidentiality. But
the pretence of a Cabinet to be the supreme instrument and authority in the state, when in fact it was subject to an outside non-elected pressure group, was to me the supreme deception. Mine,
easily, was the lesser breach of trust. In fact, had I suppressed that revelation about the reality of government in the Republic I would have become a guilty partner in the deceit.
My final ministerial memory is of my office in the Department of Health. The last ministerial pronouncements had been issued; the last trade union delegation received; my fine civil servant
staff had taken leave of me and I most regretfully of them. Our always dependable and resourceful Michael Mulvihill had delivered the important correspondence about the mother and child service to
R. M. Smyllie, editor of the
Irish Times
. This correspondence consisted of sixteen letters from myself, Seán MacBride, John Costello and members of the hierarchy. We had been warned
that the government might attempt to place an embargo on their publication, but Smyllie, an editor with genuine liberal beliefs, had promised me that should such an embargo be attempted, then, at
the risk of going to prison, he ‘would publish and be damned’.
On his return from the
Irish Times
, Mulvihill and Dick Whyte took care that all documents in our files likely to be used or misused against us were destroyed. (I was later told that
John Costello’s first demand on taking over the department was that he be given all available documents, private or otherwise.) The floor of our office was littered with rolled-up snowballs
of paper. Wastepaper baskets were full. As with a front-line soldier who had been in continuous action for a long time, my senses and perceptions were dulled by the continuous bombardment from so
many fronts. Bone weary, I sat down for the last time at my ministerial desk. Opposite me sat a dishevelled and as always unkempt Noel Hartnett.