Authors: Noël Browne
Hartnett had a disconcerting habit under stress of reaching into his tobacco-stained waistcoat pocket, and producing a cigarette butt, by choice a Woodbine (commonly known as ‘coffin
nails’) already half-smoked. He would carefully smooth out the singed ends of the butt before putting it into his mouth and lighting it. In a clear ecstasy of enjoyment, he would inhale as if
it were life-saving oxygen, closing his eyes. On this occasion he did not produce the dreaded cigarette butt. Instead, equally characteristically, he dug from that same waistcoat pocket something
just as unpleasant-looking, a two-inch stump of heavily-chewed yellow pencil. He turned then, as if to all the world, and defiantly declared ‘we have our pens’.
It was agreed that my resignation as Minister for Health should be debated in the Dáil. As I rose to speak, on 12 April 1951, there were, I believed, individuals in all parties who were
shocked by the suddenness of it, and shamed by the shoddiness of the behaviour of my Cabinet colleagues. Politically it was the end of what most of them privately agreed was a career which would
have served the public well had I been allowed to continue.
I spoke briefly. My heart was heavy that so much work still remained to be done for the health of our people. Here was I yielding up voluntarily, on a point of principle, all the power and
authority as Minister for Health in which I had placed so much hope and expectation when I had assumed office a mere three years earlier. In spite of a succession of disappointments where his
behaviour did not measure up to the potential and stature claimed for it, there remained for me a slight hope that this was the occasion on which de Valera could redeem himself. The issue was the
supremacy of ‘his’ republic, of the Dáil, and above all, of the people’s will. How much glorification had I listened to about the brave self-sacrifice and dedication, even
to death, of this quintessential Irish republican! Inevitably, with the coalition a discredited rabble, once more de Valera must be crowned King of Ireland and reassume his own significantly chosen
messianic title of Taoiseach, or leader. My hope was for a rally to democracy, the equal of Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of the rights and freedoms of a genuinely independent and free
people. Would de Valera rise to the challenge?
Not surprisingly each leader of the four coalition parties joined the chorus of denigration and abuse about my personal, political, and administrative defects and failings. Seán MacBride
used his one remaining accusation, that I was ‘mad’ not to obey the hierarchy. He told an astounded Dáil, within the privilege of parliament, ‘In my opinion, the Minister
for Health has not been normal for the last year’. This insulting clause, by order of the House, was withdrawn. The Dáil had just listened to my well-reasoned opening statement, and it
included men who, during the whole period of my ministry, had been in daily contact with me.
The intervention by Con Lehane of Clann na Poblachta was valuable. Anxious to help MacBride, he sought to rationalise the petty sectarian remark that I had been foolish enough to have been
photographed shaking hands with the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin. Lehane’s intervention corroborated the fact that MacBride had in fact made this charge, and it could no longer be denied
by him. There was a notable contribution in my support by Oliver Flanagan, surprisingly, in the light of his noted loyalty to the church. Peadar Cowan also spoke in my favour.
There was a sense of occasion as Mr de Valera slowly rose to his feet. There had been no other occasion on which a native government had so diminished us all by its pitiful submissiveness and
failure to realise the supreme privilege of cabinet office. To the disappointment of many in all parties, instead of a resounding declaration of faith in the democratic republican ethic, de Valera
muttered almost inaudibly one sentence only, ‘We have heard enough’. He then sat down. With these words de Valera and his party joined the political pygmies on the government
benches.
Dan Breen sat close to me on the opposition benches. He had not intervened so far. With de Valera safely out of the chamber Breen, the fearless one, as he headed for the bar, leaned over to me
where I sat in a mixture of disgust and contempt for my colleagues. In a hushed whisper, lest he be overheard and reported to de Valera, Breen muttered an approving, ‘Well done,
Noël’.
W
ITH THE formation of the first coalition government, William A. Norton, leader of the Irish Labour Party, had became Tanaiste
(deputy Prime Minister). Although he had been general secretary of the Post Office Workers’ Union during the 1940s, it was a measure of his indifference to the welfare of his members that the
conditions of work in the Dublin sorting offices were generally atrocious. Even following his appointment as Tanaiste and minister in Cabinet they did not improve significantly.
Norton was a man of many talents, all dedicated exclusively to his own betterment in society. He was persuasively articulate, and could simulate sincerity and pretended concern with impressive
and misleading conviction. He could feel deeply only about his own special needs. He was well read on political matters, something of an exception in that Cabinet. As a devout practising Catholic
he was an immutably committed conservative in political outlook.
Norton became a wealthy man, with a large house in an exclusive Dublin suburb. He had wide business interests, most of them in the drink trade. He distinguished himself in Cabinet by a complete
absence of ethical standards on fundamental issues affecting his own class. He willingly allowed himself to be used by the conservative Fine Gael Cabinet, while neglecting and undermining the
welfare or best interests of the working people. Shortly after the formation of the coalition, when I queried the qualifications of a man submitted by Norton for the post of District Justice, the
reply was classic Norton: ‘He’s well able for it, wasn’t he Roddy Connolly’s election agent?’ In reply to a demand for an increase in flour prices by the millers, it
was Norton who craftily proposed the device of keeping the price of the loaf the same while minimally reducing its size. He commented, ‘Women won’t notice the difference.’ This
device gave the millers their profit at the expense of the hard-pressed women and children whom Norton, as Labour Party leader, claimed to represent. During a bank strike in 1950, in the absence of
the Taoiseach, he acted as chairman to a Cabinet meeting. Using the legitimate plea that I would not be party to a lockout, I caused consternation among my Cabinet colleagues, by refusing to sign
the government order needed before the banks could close their doors. I quoted back at them their rule about collective responsibility. All, including Norton, had signified their intention of
voting for the closure.
Throughout the lifetime of that Cabinet Norton played an invaluable role for his conservative Fine Gael colleagues. Whenever I chose to contest some issue which merited a radical solution, the
Taoiseach would turn aside my criticism with the unanswerable, ‘But the Labour leader, Mr Norton, agrees; what’s your difficulty, Dr Browne?’
It was Norton who devised the escape hatch for his Cabinet colleagues, which justified their eventual U-turn on the health services: the casuist apologia, ‘We don’t want to have to
provide a free health service for the fur-coated ladies of Foxrock.’ In this way he parodied the whole rationale against means-test medicine. It was Norton also who devised the dismissive and
dishonest charge, later used against me by MacBride, that in making an issue of principle out of the elimination of the means-test from Irish medicine, I had made a ‘fetish out of a
phrase.’
It was of interest to watch how the Fine Gael group outwitted Norton in Cabinet. Under pressure from the rank and file of the Labour Party Norton was encouraged to press for an entirely new
social welfare code. Nothing could have been more unwelcome for Fine Gael. Like the rest of us, Norton was bound by Cabinet protocol, which laid down the Minister’s responsibility to make his
submissions, giving reasons for any stated proposal. Norton did this. The financial demands on the Exchequer needed to fund his social welfare proposals were considerable, even though on an
insurance rather than a seriously socialist redistributive policy; each minister had some ‘special’ needs which must be curtailed if Norton’s scheme were to be implemented.
I noticed a number of queries, counterqueries, objections, tendering of memoranda on ideological grounds, which accumulated around Norton’s proposals with each successive Cabinet meeting.
One of the last memories of Cabinet meetings I have is of seeing the quarter-inch thick brief with which Norton had earlier introduced his proposals become inches thicker until the final brief was
nearly nine inches high. His proposal for a social welfare scheme appeared to be little nearer a final solution and in fact never was realised. This is one of the not-so-subtle ways in which the
conservative majority party in a coalition can ‘legitimately’ frustrate radical proposals submitted by the ‘minority’ parties. One wonders to what extent Norton had
collaborated in the delay.
It is difficult to believe now that on one occasion in the 1950s our annual Budget was under £100 million. The Taoiseach had virtually no understanding of problems of fiscal policy, and
was shocked to notice that taken together all our departments’ financial submissions required more than £100 million. His response was characteristically simple-minded, and of doubtful
morality. He issued an appeal to all of us to send in falsified figures for our departmental needs on the assurance that, after the Budget was passed, we would be permitted ‘all the money we
needed to run our departments.’ This money would be made available in subsequent supplementary estimates. To my surprise, all my Cabinet colleagues appeared to have agreed to these proposals.
I refused to accede to their request. Appeals were made to me to change my mind repeatedly, but I declined to do so. What was particularly disturbing to me was the apparent failure of my party and
Cabinet colleague, Mr MacBride, to share my attitude.
In a succession of telephone conversations, one of the most persistent of those who appealed to me to change my mind was Norton. ‘I’m prepared to do it, Noël, I’ll see you
get all you want after the Budget. Why not agree, and so help us to keep the figures in the Book of Estimates under a hundred million pounds?’ This had been Costello’s appeal to his
colleagues. Even if there was no moral issue involved, the fact that they had all joined in such a conspiracy to mislead the public, and inevitably Fianna Fáil, would or could be used later
by the Fine Gael ministers against Clann na Poblachta and the Labour ministers. Since difficulties had already arisen about the mother and child scheme, I could become subject to blackmail by all
or any one of them. Should the Cabinet decide to renege on it, the fact that I had been party to the conspiracy could be used to compel me to agree to their proposals about a watered-down health
service.
Norton was a notorious hedonist. He enjoyed the good life. He was a small, grossly overweight figure, with a great square bullock-shaped head. Though his eyes were buried behind inch-thick horn
spectacles, they were, without doubt, his crowning glory. There was never a merrier, more sparkling, sherry-cream brown pair of eyes on any man or woman; they could effect a dangerously disarming
influence on a critic. His irreverent and ribald sense of humour was heard only in safe privacy. The clergy and his fellow trade unionists were his favourite targets. He was master of the art of
mock indignation. In the Dáil, when angrily replying to MacEntee, his main tormentor on the opposition benches, he had no difficulty in forgetting his rage smilingly to ridicule his opponent
for some personal weaknesses. His anger was skin deep, as superficial as his radicalism.
It was said that while in opposition Seán Lemass was responsible for a political column in the
Irish Press
. Understandably he concentrated on the members of our Cabinet, and all
of us came under scrutiny. The Lemass column about Norton was one day referred to in Cabinet by Cecil Lavery, our Attorney General, at the conclusion of our usual business. Lavery remarked that he
believed Norton had a reasonable cause for legal action against the columnist, who had dismissed Norton as a minister who was only minimally concerned with his Department of Social Welfare and, in
effect, bone lazy. Whether acting on Lavery’s advice or not, Norton duly took an action in the High Court. A Dublin jury of his peers had little doubt about the validity of the comment, and
awarded the Labour leader contempt damages of one pound. Following the humiliating verdict, MacEntee liked to rouse Norton in the Dáil by calling him ‘Billy the Quid.’
Norton wallowed in the sumptuous banquets arranged for visiting foreign dignitaries. His childish enjoyment at table evoked feelings of amusement and revulsion. My wife and I would watch
incredulously as he would call for a second helping of his favourite sweet, a spun sugar confection which stood about four inches high and was shaped as a bird’s nest. With his table napkin
tucked firmly into his straining white collar, his flickering brown monkey’s eyes would lovingly follow the waiter and his spoon as he loaded the plate down for the second time. Spoon and
fork filled the sugary syrup into his mouth until there remained only the melted warm honey mixture on his plate. This too was greedily scooped into his now slobbering mouth. Like a hungry sucking
piglet, frantically probing the fat sow’s belly, spoon and fork were followed by his chubby fingers and last of all his thumb, each of them lovingly and lingeringly sucked dry. Fingers licked
clean, he would hold a lighted scarlet and gold-labelled Havana in one sticky hand and caress his well-filled brandy glass in the other. Norton, the workers’ leader, lived Larkin’s
‘Nothing is too good for the working classes.’ But for the Irish worker the good things of life stopped at Norton.
The rank and file of the Labour Party were sympathetic to the social advances proposed in the health scheme, and widely welcomed them. But the Labour leadership, with the help of the Stalinist
group in the party then, had no great difficulty in manipulating a complete reversal of policy whenever it was needed. So it was on this occasion. It was Norton, indeed, who devised the clever
arguments — ‘I won’t go against my bishops,’; ‘those who need it most,’ ‘fur-coated ladies’ — against the health scheme. They had the advantage
of appearing to radicalise the argument against the means-test. They were gladly accepted and subsequently used by Fine Gael and other conservative members of the party and the Cabinet, including
MacBride. Mr Norton’s ingenious argument was ‘I don’t see why I should pay taxes so as to provide a free health service for those who can afford one.’ So did he coat the
pill for the retention of the discriminating medical system for his working-class electorate.