Against the Tide (42 page)

Thornley yearned for Cabinet office at any price and on any terms, preferably in a Fine Gael coalition. As his speeches have shown the nation lost in him a fertile, innovative and original mind.
Together with Cluskey, Cruise O’Brien, Keating, Halligan and the others, he now worked with a manic dedication for a coalition with Fine Gael. Well I recall seeing his head bounding along
behind the delegates’ seats at the Labour Party conference in Cork in 1970 as he went from one to the next in a frenzied attempt to win their support for a coalition. His dedicated zeal was
to help achieve this objective for all of that cabal, with the exception of Thornley himself, who was shed by the Labour leadership with chilling indifference when they failed to appoint him to a
ministry.

It is important to apportion fairly the responsibility for this. O’Brien, Keating, Desmond, Tully, Corish, the rural deputies, the intellectuals and urban working-class alike — all
shared equally in this mean act. While such a political defeat is a commonplace occupational hazard of public life, the effect on a man of Thornley’s delicately-balanced psychological make-up
was catastrophic. He simply could not credit the duplicity of those within the Labour leadership with whom he had ingratiated himself in order to promote and help their joint ministerial ambitions.
He had deserted all his formal radical postures and friends in their interests. Those of us who retained our affection for him, and for his self-sacrificing, devoted and loyal wife, Petria, shared
their distress.

Thornley appeared to have resolved to bury himself and to disappear within a grotesquely altered human being. Rapidly he became the direct opposite to the mildly vain, impeccably dressed,
scintillatingly intelligent young Trinity don all of us had known. We were at the Labour Party Conference in the Leisureland centre in Galway sometime after this. We had already passed this
hideously distorted creature when my wife, shocked, murmured ‘That was David’. Between heavy drinking, illness and neglect of his appearance, David had taken on the form which in
psychiatry is known sometimes as a variant of the ‘Pickwick boy’ syndrome. His eyes were scarcely visible, buried as they were in the great distended blubber of a once handsome
face.

In spite of the attempts of many of us, still his friends, who desperately wanted to help, David was unhappily inaccessible to reason. Shortly he was to gain the only relief and peace open to
him, dying at a very young age in June, 1978. Characteristically, all the Labour Party leadership turned up at his funeral, as they had to the funeral of yet another talented young man who had been
expelled from the Labour Party, the incomparable Brendan Scott. Within the Irish Labour Party, there was no place for such men.

The Labour Party refused to nominate me as a candidate in the 1975 general election because I would not sign a pledge supporting a coalition agreement with Fine Gael. A lot of my supporters were
annoyed and left the party, but I saw no point in resigning. Dr Ryder, of Cork, suggested that I should stand for the Senate on the Trinity College panel and I won the seat left vacant by the death
of Owen Sheehy Skeffington.

I was able to use the Upper House to criticise the government on various social issues, in particular contraception; before resigning as Labour spokesman on Health the previous year I had
attempted to introduce a bill on contraception.

The National Coalition’s period in office coincided with the oil crisis and a period of inflation which saw many prices increase by over 100 per cent. The Fine Gael Taoiseach, Liam
Cosgrave, had shrewdly allocated Labour the more vulnerable money-spending ministries without any money to spend. Michael O’Leary was to find himself blamed for the unprecedented unemployment
figures, Justin Keating for the sell-out of our natural resources and the collapse of price controls, Jim Tully for the recession in the building industry and Brendan Corish for the total
stagnation and inaction on social welfare, while Conor Cruise O’Brien’s mis-management of his Department of Posts and Telegraphs.

Having been elected to the Senate, I declined to take the Labour whip. To my mind there was a matter of principle involved. In 1977, when the coalition was finally forced to go to the country, I
stood for the Dublin Artane constituency where I was now living. The Labour Party refused to endorse my candidature. They used as their reason my failure to take the Labour whip in the Senate.

That being so, I stood as an Independent, and was easily elected with 6,600 first preference votes. As I had warned the Labour party in 1974, at the final parliamentary meeting at which they
decided to go into coalition, the general election in 1977 was a total debacle for the party. Though they had won 17 seats, their share of the poll had dropped from 17% in 1969, to 11.6% in 1977.
Thereafter, nothing could stop the continuous, inglorious slide of Connolly’s labour party into oblivion. Its current miniscule 4% of the poll tells its own tale. Both Justin Keating and
Conor Cruise O’Brien, powerful and influential advocates of coalition, were defeated. Meanwhile, the Labour country deputies whom Keating had contemptuously dismissed as the
‘culchies’, survived to take over what was left of the party, and finished it off.

Regrettably, for the second time in my political career, in 1981, on being returned in the new constituency of Dublin North Central, I found myself holding the balance of power in the
Dáil. With Hobson’s choice, FitzGerald or Haughey, I supported FitzGerald despite my own doubts about his capacity to realise his hopes for a liberal crusade.

Because, among other influential people, Garret FitzGerald continuously dismissed the possibility of Catholic hierarchical interference in government as ‘a thing of the past’, I
decided to test the assumption. In 1979, I put down about forty amendments to Haughey’s blatantly sectarian Family Planning Bill. It was my intention that were the amendments accepted, our
family planning facilities would be comparable to those available now throughout the advanced world. It was as if I had had the plague. No party, no individual deputy, made any attempt to debate
those possibilities, during the long period in which I was involved along in the Dáil. There was no woman deputy prepared to support my proposals. Equally I moved a Private Members’
Bill on divorce in 1980. There is no divorce in the Republic, because of a Constitutional ban included in de Valera’s 1937 Constitution. Though both the Labour Party and Fine Gael annual
conferences had voted to investigate the matter of divorce in the Republic, not a single deputy in any of the parties rose to support even the proposal that the matter be debated. My proposal was
defeated by default. The same was true on the question of both gay rights and abortion. Though there were at the time six women members in the House, none were prepared to claim for women that in
such a matter as important as an unwanted pregnancy, women had a ‘right to choose’. Neither were the men or women deputies prepared to support the plea made by the minority churches in
the republic that, in their opinion, in case of rape with consequential pregnancy, or where the birth of an anencephalic monster was inevitable, or in case of pregnancy following incest, the right
to terminate pregnancy should rest with the woman. I was the only member of the House who, on behalf of Irish womanhood, claimed their ‘right to choose’. It was on the issue of divorce
that the minority churches were also ignored, when they claimed that, in their belief, divorce should in carefully limited circumstances be permissible.

It was soon after this, with the 1982 budget introduced by John Bruton, that the government fell, on the proposal to impose VAT on childrens’ shoes. Considering the multi-million pound
size of the budget involved, it was a particularly silly proposal. Yet, FitzGerald and Bruton proudly claimed to have discovered a serious source of tax evasion. As the debate concluded, FitzGerald
enormously pleased with his vigilance showed me a piece of paper, cluttered with figures. He claimed that the figures proved that women with small feet could buy childrens’ shoes, to wear
themselves. So, since childrens’ shoes were not rated for VAT, the women could avoid paying tax. Helplessly and hopelessly, I turned away, murmuring, ‘Who cares?’ Of such
imbecilities are the trivia which determine issues in public life in the Republic — even to bringing down governments. That government could find its way into the
Guinness Book of
Records
as the shortest living administration government in the history of the republic.

Nevertheless, Garret FitzGerald went on to the even greater and much more serious misjudgement in, unilaterally with the British, drawing up the infamous Anglo-Irish agreement, with all its
blatantly unenforceable guarantees to the Northern Protestant Unionists.

After his defeat by the church on the Constitutional amendments needed to introduce divorce in Ireland, FitzGerald must at last be convinced, that, on the really important matters affecting the
whole community in the Republic, ‘Bishops’ rule still O.K.’, as I said in the Senate some years before.

N
OW in the seventh and final of Shakespeare’s ages, impeded by increasing frailty, there is time for reflection. No longer
may the patronising elders, envious yet critical of the young, tell them ‘it was so much worse in our time’. Bad it may have been, but today’s children must endure the
all-pervasive shadow of a grim nuclear nemesis seemingly beyond their control. Samuel Beckett’s bleak truth: ‘the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to
weep, another stops. The same is true of the laugh’.

On the credit side, the Marxists claim that with mixed enthusiasm and success, one third of the world struggles on towards the socialist millenia. The capitalist world, to a great extent
casualty of its own unique scientific ingenuity and greed, is in total disarray. Yet in a stagnating and bankrupt Ireland there is no politics. Both North and South voters uncritically cheer on
their team, like schoolboy football supporters, swearing blind loyalty to their leaders.

For a member of the medical profession and a conscientious radical, the problem always was how best to rationalise political involvement in a society where primitive superstition replaces the
mature political ideologies of the outside world. My three years as Minister for Health was a commitment to political involvement. Lives were saved, suffering and pain were avoided or reduced. Fine
modern hospitals and clinics were built all over Ireland. The elimination of tuberculosis was achieved and the infra-structure for a good health service was established. Progress at that level was
possible through politics until I was overwhelmed by an obscurantist tide at its high spring. By relegation to the back benches, it was hoped that I could be rendered harmless.

Why was it that, after such an experience, I neither returned to medical practice exclusively nor emigrated to a satisfying job in the British national health service? Again Samuel Beckett put
it well:

That being the form of Irish medical practice why waste time as a doctor in Ireland?

Is there not another side to that argument? Medical practice being thus, how could a conscientious doctor leave a whole community to the depredations of medical practice of the time? To remain a
constant critic was to me a valid option.

There is however beyond the visible achievement of my three short years as Minister, my conviction that the failure by society in the Republic to distinguish between the profession of politics
and its practitioners is a grave mis-judgement by the Irish people of the proper function, scope and potential of politics. Just as my own brief period in charge of a minor department, and as
Seán Lemass also showed in industry and commerce, major achievements could not have been recorded other than through political action. I could have worked for a lifetime as general
practitioner or consultant and not achieved any advance in hospital care or welfare. Is it not extraordinary that in advanced western society, in its education of the professions, elaborate
institutions are built at enormous expenditure from public funds to equip avowedly and inevitably elitist universities and colleges?

At the same time, education for the individual who is to be responsible for the successful creation of a prosperous community in which university graduates will work at their various
professions, is virtually non-existent. The arcane art and skill of politics is left to untrained, unskilled and whimsical ‘do-gooders’ who choose to designate themselves as
politicians. Overnight they are entrusted with the phenomenally difficult task of designing, building and administering the elaborate structures of a modern society in which the creation of wealth
and its enlightened distribution is ensured. In its potential for society the profession of politics transcends the separate and individual wisdom and skills of every component of that society.
Above all other questions, society must ask should politics be left to the amateur? There is no aspect of our lives, in education, in health or sickness or recreation in youth or in old age where
individual human happiness is so crucially dependant on the professional skills of adequately trained politicians.

As to my thirty years sojourn on the backbenches my friend Paul Campbell recently commented in wry commiseration: ‘You’re the watchdog, Noël, to whom nobody listened!’ It
was a dismissive observation on backbench politics. Yet in recent times, new and contentious arguments on subjects so long forbidden are now widely debated and championed by one-time conformist and
fearful political colleagues. Maybe from the backbenches I helped in that enlightenment. Despite the confusion of political parties with their misleading republican rhetoric and primitive loyalties
there was a re-assuring accolade at the end of my political career. Generously and unanimously, our parliamentary correspondents united in their citation: ‘Consistently he has pursued his
socialist objectives’.