Against the Tide (43 page)
Authors: Noël Browne
Because of my unique life experience in Ireland and England in both working and middle class milieux, there is one inescapable conclusion. With few exceptions it is as difficult for a member of
the working class in the Republic to leave that class, with all its limitations and penalties, as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The question needs to be posed as to how in a
society where the working classes constitute the vast majority of an electorate they continue to elect politicians who maintain an educational system which so blatantly discriminates against them
and their children? Such discrimination persists in the health services, in employment, in housing, in recreation, against women and in living conditions among the aged. Because of this obvious
anomaly, the thoughtful have long since shed the fiction that through our system of parliamentary democracy do we have an effective instrument of popular will. As in the Aesop fable of the Fox and
the Crow, the middle class continues to hold power and to use it so that it is retained.
Possibly one of the greatest disappointments has been that the leadership of the Irish trade union movement has made little serious attempt to use its resources and the network of its contacts
among working people to protest against, or to displace this carefully constructed discriminatory feature of the Irish educational system against its members.
Saddest of all are the daily television images of countless millions of starving children, including those of the one million of our own people on the poverty line, while food surpluses
accumulate that few can pay for. In the failure by politicians to resolve this obscene dilemma, could there be a more compelling defence for the role of a properly educated and enlightened
politician as a first step towards justice in modern society?
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© Noël Browne 1986, 2007, 2012
First published 1986
Second edition published 2007
This ebook edition published by Gill & Macmillan 2012
978 07171 4295 8 (print)
978 07171 5549 1 (epub)
978 07171 5550 7 (mobi)
Cover design by Slick Fish Design
(www.slickfish.ie)
Cover illustration: ‘Portrait of Noël Browne’ (detail), Robert Ballagh collection, National Gallery of Ireland
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission of the
publishers.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The website addresses referred to in this book were correct at the time of first publication.
About the Author
Noël Christopher Browne (1915–1997), physician and politician. Born in Waterford; educated at Beaumont College, London, and TCD. Browne, whose comfortable family
background was ravaged by tuberculosis, was informally adopted by a wealthy Dublin family following the death of his parents, and qualified as a doctor in 1940. In 1948 he was elected a TD for the
new Clann na Poblachta and became Minister for Health on his first day in Dáil Éireann. Between then and his forced resignation in 1951, when the medical profession and the Catholic
bishops opposed his plans for a free Mother-and-Child medical service, he achieved a reputation as a forceful and visionary — if individualistic and unpredictable — minister, with a
dedication to public health that was in advance of its time. He remained in active politics, with some breaks, until 1982, in five different parties (Clann na Poblachta, Fianna Fáil,
National Progressive Democrats, Labour Party, and the Socialist Labour Party) and as an independent, but never again held office. Despite frequent changes of position — sometimes
anti-communist, sometimes pro-Soviet — he became a lodestar for many on the left for whom the Labour Party (to which he belonged from 1963 to 1977) was an often unsatisfactory champion.
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Against the Tide
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All in a Life
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Soundings
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4. Again seated on the left — now as house physician at Dr Steeven’s Hospital in 1942.
5. As Minister for Health — a formal portrait taken in 1948.
6. With Phyllis, three years later in 1951.
8. The Cabinet proceeds to the declaration ceremony. I never favoured the top hats of my colleagues.
13. With Sean Dunne TD and Jack McQuillan TD at Leinster House in 1961.
