Authors: Noël Browne
It has been said of politicians that we act a lot. Actors and politicians have this in common; their lives are lived in public, and they share the experiences of acclaim, failure, excitement, or
the misery of defeat. Above all there is the insecurity of employment and sudden loss of a job.
But in politics everyone, government and opposition, makes up both the cast and the audience in the parliamentary theatre.
The shrill bell rings at ten minutes to three, and from all parts of the House deputies make their way to the Dáil chamber, which fills with ministers in varying degrees of unconcern and
apprehension, all of them fresh from their departmental briefing.
To protect the minister on ‘the day’. civil servants comb every available source of information about every question. The Dáil Reports, those great green volumes stretching
back to 1922 and the Treaty Debates, are leafed through for useful ammunition. If an ex-minister is now the questioner, the civil servant obediently changes sides. He collates every word, every
promise, every refusal or dismissal as ‘impractical’, of the present idea made by that previous minister.
Soon there is nothing more to be done; the politician is as much on his own as is the actor with a new play, but the politician always performs before a predominantly hostile audience. At least
half of it will not approve of his performance, no matter how good his act. The parliamentary opposition must always be hostile; it is their job to prevent the minister from appearing to do his job
well. No matter what you say, you will be told, ‘you could have done more’ or ‘done it sooner’, or ‘why wait to be asked?’ No minister can ever win. The
opposition must convince journalists, and through the journalists the electorate outside, that in Leinster House, in helpless frustration, quite wrongly and unjustly in opposition, there sits a
group of men and women who could do the job infinitely better than the present lot.
Such is the dynamic of parliamentary politics. It is accepted by both sides, yet it doesn’t make performing on that stage any more pleasant. ‘Will I get confused, or
flustered?’ ‘Will my store of information suffice?’ ‘Have they information which we have not got?’ In those carefree days in opposition, did you make wild promises
about what you could do, and of greater importance,
would
do when you came to office? Now those easily-spoken words come back to haunt and humiliate you.
The suddenness with which you can lose your job hangs over both the actor and politician. With a handful of exceptions, for whom life must be pleasantly dull, your political existence can end at
any time. For the actor there is the empty theatre and no audience. For the politician there is the empty public hall, no-one interested in what you have to say.
While I never came to enjoy question time as minister, I certainly enjoyed it from the backbenches with Jack McQuillan. It is a valuable feature of parliamentary democracy; its suppression must
be a cherished objective for an impending dictator. Yet question time had become subject to abuse by government deputies ‘flooding the question paper’, thus slowing up the production of
replies from ministers. In the past the Order Paper was cleared by the end of each week. Every minister could expect to answer questions, and the real questioners, the outside public, would be
certain of a quick reply.
But it is hard to get more information from an experienced minister than he chooses to give. Dr Tom O’Higgins was a master of the pleasantly evasive answer. Dr Jim Ryan specialised in
practically monosyllabic mumbling replies. He did not seem to mind whether he had satisfied you or not; looking across the floor over his spectacles in surprise at your persistence, he gave the
impression that you’d no right to be bothering him. Each of these ministers, especially when they dealt with each other’s party members, could introduce savage, angry and bitter
recriminations about the civil war. As a young politician in Leinster House, I recall my shock at the white-hot hate with which that terrible episode had marked their lives. The trigger words were
‘seventy-seven’, ‘Ballyseedy’, ‘Dick and Joe’ and, above all, ‘The Treaty’ and ‘damn good bargain’. The raised tiers of the Dáil
chamber would become filled with shouting, gesticulating, clamouring, suddenly angry men.
McQuillan and I together could batter on the doors of Leinster House until kingdom come and go unheard. It was the only question on which all three parties agreed. Readily they combined all
their forces to be rid of us so that they could continue with their prolonged parliamentary squabbles about who started, who won, and who lost the civil war. We were considered to be irrevelant and
tiresome interlopers. With no wounds to display and no blood on our hands, we were represented as intruders by both sides. Between them they had created a fantasy world of myths, ballads and
questionable statistics, at the heart of which each one of them was a Jack the Giantkiller, yet of that time Kevin O’Higgins was to say to all the bombast, ‘We have not been able to
drive the British from anything beyond a good-size police barracks’. Marvelling at the thousands of IRA pensioners I heard MacEoin, himself the genuine article, smilingly wonder, ‘Where
were all these brave warriors when we needed them?’
Throughout our years in parliament, there was no serious mature informed debate on the causes for our chronic misuse of land, labour and capital in the creation of wealth, either in industry or
agriculture. Nor have we seriously attempted to understand the causes or deal with the gross maldistribution of wealth and the mass suffering and chronic poverty of so many. For all the influence
that our generation has had on that fossilised fly in amber which is Irish public life, we might as well not have tried. Too old to fight now, undisturbed, they were content to pester one another
about each other’s motives for the rest of their lives. They had no interest whatever in the outside world.
Finally the curtain falls for the last time on a parliament. The transient, ephemeral fate of the actor can also be seen in the politician’s brief life. Following his defeat in the House
of Commons, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan soon afterwards was photographed at a bus stop; he had been deprived of his state car. He spoke whimsically of the speed with which
‘they roll up the red carpet’. On the night of my own resignation as Minister for Health the driver of my state car, Joe Shanahan, was compelled to tell me that from that moment he had
no legal right to use the state car to drive me home. However, Garda Joe Shanahan never ceased to be the kindly man I and my family knew him to be, and he drove me home regardless.
It was not the unpredictability of public life that most impressed me. It was the ritual preceding the change of government, the purest of all theatre. The last speech in defence of the
government is over. The opposition has ended its tirade of criticism and abuse. All sides have exhausted their rhetoric. At last there is a call for a vote. As the vote is taken, each deputy passes
slowly up the steep stairs out of the debating chamber. At the head of the nearly vertical stairway to the voting lobby, those in favour of the government go to the left, and those against go to
the right. The last remaining deputies, uncertain as Independents how to vote and survive, move reluctantly past the two tellers. They could be voting themselves out of parliamentary life for ever.
There is a Government teller and one for the Opposition at each gate into the voting lobby, and a deputy for the Government and for the Opposition supervising the tellers;
nemine crede
operates here as in Maynooth. They see that the count is correct, and so recorded. With the proliferation of the smaller parties and independents, even the shrewdest of tallymen may get their sums
wrong. The last vote is verified by the tellers. Then comes the verdict for which all anxiously wait. The usually noisy chattering monkey house of the Dáil Chamber falls silent. The bleak
prospect looms in all our thoughts; a general election, with all its worries, expense and uncertainties, especially for the marginal seats. Some are about to take their last lingering look around
the Dáil for ever. All eyes await the appearance of the teller at the top of the steps. Here is the first crucial indication; whichever party teller is entrusted with the tally paper tells
the waiting deputies their fate, and the result of the count. Cheers, from one side only, welcome the trot, sometimes breaking into a run, of the teller down the steps, I have seen hopeful shadow
ministers ingratiate themselves with fervent hand-clasps of congratulations for the Taoiseach to be. The unconcealed dismay, the brave smiles, the silence of the government benches, tell all.
Yet for me easily the most moving moment occurs in the solemn ritual which follows the voting: the statement made by the Ceann Comhairle following his formal notification of the result of the
count to the House. In 1948 de Valera and his government, after sixteen long years in office, were still seated slightly stunned on the government benches. That strange mixture of parties, a
coalition of novices, sat opposite. Following the receipt of his slip of paper Frank Fahy, old Fianna Fáil veteran, slowly came to his feet. He read out the result of the tellers’
count, as verified by the clerk of the Dáil; there erupted the usual one-sided cheers. As they subsided, the Ceann Comhairle made his simple statement. He declared, ‘The government
motion has been defeated. The Dáil will retire for two hours, and resume at 6 p.m. On resumption, the government will move to the right, and the opposition will move to the left’. With
the declared authority of a majority of the people, that formula peacefully stripped all power from a government of men and women. With these words, they had lost control of the generals, the army,
the police, the courts and the jails. Taken from them was control over education, health, agricultural policies, the power to create and distribute wealth.
For the immature and the bully the world over, violence is the easiest way. For the mature and the civilised, a peaceful solution, though more difficult, is, in the end, inevitable. If only
representative democracy could be permitted to work within a mature, literate, well-informed electorate! It is the preservation of this peaceful transition which is the basis of my dogged
resistance to the usurpation of this ultimate authority by a non-elected extra-parliamentary body. Most of us believe that while parliamentary democracy is not an ideal form of government, there
are others which are worse.
The propaganda against Jack McQuillan and myself throughout our years on the backbenches was blatant, widespread and insidious. I do not complain about that; it is part of the mechanics of
politics. We had to be silenced. It is a great tribute to the electorate that they kept putting both of us back in spite of the lies. That is the beauty of the secret ballot. Once I was at the
polling booth at an election and a lady came in pushing a pram, with one child in her arms and another holding onto the handles. Through gritted teeth she said ‘It won’t be our fault if
you don’t get in’. Women were very oppressed at the time, but they knew somehow or other that even though I was a ‘Communist’ and an ‘atheist’,
‘anti-clerical’ and ‘anti-Christ’, everything you could think of as far as propaganda was concerned, I was still somebody who was anxious to help ordinary people.
Jack McQuillan and myself moved probably the last motion to which Mr de Valera replied. Many believed that it was probably instrumental in prompting him to leave office.
By accident, we were to uncover the true extent to which de Valera exercised personal control over the Irish Press group of newspapers. These newspapers influenced a substantial number of the
Irish people and created and kept unchallenged the awesome charisma of Eamon de Valera. They also contributed to the formation of the unique Fianna Fáil ethos of Irish republicanism,
particularly in rural areas. Independent Newspapers were just as conservative and Catholic, though not ‘republican’.
Those of our citizens who would not conform to this society could not get work and were forced into exile. Britain, the US and the Commonwealth were de Valera’s parallel to Stalin’s
Siberia. Compulsory exile afflicted many of our writers and artists. Pressure to conform was exercised in a hundred variants of my own, my wife’s and our children’s experience after the
mother and child row. Emigration was an indispensable policy plank for all parties. The ‘hated John Bull’ would look after us and feed us. Our leaders meanwhile ranted on about the
iniquity of the British and felt no shame whatever about the jobless unwanted Irish exiles.
How many letters did Jack McQuillan and I get from young exiles in the four corners of the world, saying ‘Keep up the good work’. What a solution to a nation’s unsolved social
evils!
Somewhere, anywhere, just get out of sight, out of mind except for the grieving families. It is little wonder that Irish society wore that well-known contented look on the faces of the
survivors, who enjoyed an entirely fraudulent prosperity under de Valera’s benevolent rule. In the
Irish Press
the pattern of Fianna Fáil election strategies was developed
between the 1930s and 1950s, shamelessly fostering the cult of the warrior and the soldier and typified by the nation’s bellicose national anthem, the Soldier’s Song. Having been a
soldier of the republic was enough to ensure Dan Breen’s success at the polls; having been a soldier and wounded was enough to last him a lifetime in Leinster House. De Valera’s most
telling sobriquet for years was ‘the last surviving commandant of 1916’. I have no wish to denigrate the achievements of that generation of soldiers or the intelligence of the
electorate. But this uncritical blind loyalty to the soldier was no substitute for a discernible ideology or serious political policy.
For years I have been pilloried for my beliefs about Irish republicanism and its conservative sectarian nature. It is asserted among republicans that ‘while good on social matters, Browne
is bad on the national issue’. My reply would be that many of my republican comrades are both confused on the national issues and bad on social issues. To me, nationalism without social aims
is akin to fascism. Republicanism without pluralism and secularism is a contradiction. As one of his devoted admirers, I have always been puzzled by Connolly’s actions in 1916 in the face of
his then clear-headed assessment of the objectives of Irish nationalism. He had defined his concept of narrow Irish nationalism which would follow the ‘rising’ in his memorable and
perceptive essay on the ‘Whoop it up for Ireland’ green nationalists of the period. It would ‘change nothing . . . The cap badges of the Corporation officials, evicting the pauper
tenants from their council houses, would have a harp instead of a crown . . . The pillar boxes would be painted green’.