Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  Hartnett himself was involved in the second incident. During a Dáil debate in the early 1940s, a seemingly placatory speech was made by Seán MacEntee about the Fine Gael party. He seemed to express doubts about the validity of the anti-treaty ‘republican’ cause and even to sympathise with Kevin O’Higgins. Hartnett was a traditional Irish republican whose family had been burnt out in the civil war, and it appeared to him, and to those who supported him, that MacEntee’s speech was a betrayal of the Republic. In addition, the name of O’Higgins had been mentioned, and not in revulsion. Was there not the bloody reality of seventy-seven republican comrades executed on O’Higgins’s orders, without trial?

  A move was made by Hartnett to have MacEntee disciplined. Once again, de Valera played the non-committal sphinx. The debate went against the republicans. Towards its end Erskine Childers, embarrassed by the anger and hatred expressed, stood up to walk out. Hartnett stopped him, as he attempted to pass, and pleaded, ‘Stay for the vote, Erskine, you must know it is your father’s name we are vindicating.’ Childers passed on, and out of the room. Hartnett noted that de Valera made no attempt to take sides, or to defend the republican position.

  Hartnett was probably the only member of the leadership of Clann na Poblachta with a wide academic training. The army sector of Clann na Poblachta, including MacBride, began their orthodox political lives virtually on the same day as the rest of us beginners. Whatever else divided us, we had in common this dependence on Hartnett. Hartnett was a small plump pink-faced figure, under five feet in height, Pickwickian in shape. He had fine thin auburn hair, which normally grew as it would. On formal occasions a quickly wetted comb was briskly produced to induce a transverse Kerry ‘quiff’. This lay across the top of his forehead; the rest, untouched, lay in continued chaos behind. He himself frequently but tenderly ridiculed the unquestionable ugliness of his face. Its most notable features were his two small menacing flinty blue eyes, and his disproportionately large nose, which gave him a rich, mellifluous speaking voice. In repose, his mouth went straight across his face, like two razor blades.

  Hartnett’s smile was used in its strictly primordial social role, ‘to reassure a hostile tribe’, and was rarely sincere. Like a bullet shattering a plate glass window, his face could splinter into that blazing smile. Its effect was instantaneous, disarming and bewildering.

  In spite of his fine mind and academic training, Hartnett showed much of the confused sentimentality and spontaneous romantic nationalism of the Kerry republican. He had a natural gift for moving platform oratory in the old oratorical style of rhetoric and phrasing. He also had his weaknesses, a dangerous one being a petulant intolerance and impatience of dissent with his opinions or prejudices. While this mellowed with time, there was more of the didact and authoritarian than the democrat to Hartnett. I have listened to him harangue a civic guard who quite rightly stopped us for a minor traffic offence. From behind his customary poisonously-smelling Woodbine, drumming an angry tattoo on his quivering knee with pudgy heavily-nicotined fingers, Hartnett complained haughtily, ‘Garda, I would have you know that I am a member of the Irish Bar.’ Not for the first time puzzled by his contradictions, I wondered how Hartnett could conclude that being a member of the legal profession could qualify him to break the law. Hartnett once criticised McQuillan and myself in the Dáil because we had ridiculed the guards of honour, wigs and gowns of the Law Courts. Neither he nor his fellow republicans have ever chosen to discard these silly trappings of our colonial past. On being challenged at a meeting in Beggar’s Bush to socialise the lawyers now that he had decided to socialise medicine, Hartnett instantly sprang to their defence and called out ‘hands off the law.’

  I recall canvassing with Hartnett in the early 1950s at a city centre block of flats, Oliver Bond House. It was a winter election, the wind cold and gusty off the river. The rain plopped down from the eaves onto the stained frilly edges of his grey trilby hat, onto his face and down the side of his bulbous nose, from which, fascinated, I watched it trickle off, seemingly unnoticed by him into his mouth. I was reminded of one of those unpredictable amusement arcade pinball games. Water soaked his overcoat which, being off the peg and ill-fitting, came down over his shoulders on each side, and trickled down onto his lumpy, uncleaned, good quality ‘reverend mother’ black leather shoes, soaking his obviously uncared-for, accordion-pleated trousers.

  We passed on slowly and mournfully, followed by poorly nourished, ill-clad, thumb-sucking, begging youngsters. They appeared to come out of the hallways, the doors, the liftshafts, under, through and over the balconies to harass and torment him. Dying for a smoke, Hartnett was no child-lover, and did not pretend to be. No votes, so no smiles for them. To me wryly through his teeth he muttered, as he delicately tipped the ash of his Woodbine, held as a lady holds her teacup, finger fanned out, ‘Let’s make it a part of our party platform, Noel, to employ a fleet of helicopters to fly over all the working class flat areas of Dublin, seven days a week for a year, to start with, and shower them with contraceptives’. He was not smiling. We stumbled on.

  Towards the end of his life, Hartnett became disillusioned by the sectarian bigotry of Irish society. For him the classical Greek writers had already spoken for all of us, and for all time. He spoke of ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water,’ a Trinity intellectual’s classic snobbish summary of the communist manifesto and Lenin’s socialist revolution. He could ignore the disagreeable features of Plato’s republic with its elitist assumptions; no doubt he presumed his own membership of that elite. He told me, ‘The day will come, Noel, when we will have to seek refuge from these petty bigots here, and look for justice North of the border.’ In disgust, he once protested that we should all ‘get out of this inhospitable windswept island, it’s only fit for the seagulls.’

  Hartnett had many of the characteristics of the leading figure in a story he liked to tell about Kerry republicanism. The scene is a wild isolated village on a dark wet winter’s night in south Kerry. The ‘republicans’ have been excommunicated by the Catholic Church and are on the run. The small church is just about to conclude Benediction. The front door is thrown open. Seven unkempt, weary-looking men, armed with the usual strange assortment of rifles, shotguns, and pistols, stand there deferentially with caps in their hands. The leader halts the service with a shout, and strides up to the altar rails, followed by his guerillas. Then, brave fellow, he calls on the priest and congregation for a decade of the rosary for the soul of the man lying in the coffin in the small side chapel, a republican comrade who had been killed in action. Republicans at that time were denied by the Church their last cherished ritual of prayers for the dead. Armed as he is, he has no difficulty in getting the ‘Hail Marys’, with the concluding ‘May the Lord have mercy on his soul’.

  Satisfied, he smartly calls his men to order, ‘about turn’ and out the door. The last man to leave, he swaggers after his men through the door and, as he does so, turns on his heel, snaps his fingers in the priest’s face, and calls out, defiantly, ‘Now you can turn me into a canary if you want to, Father.’ He was a typical superstitious Irish republican, who sought to ridicule the ‘druid’, yet, in spite of his braggadacio, he was both respectful and fearful enough to address the priest as ‘Father’ and ask for his prayers. Hartnett himself was to die with all the rites of the church to help him on his way.

  Hartnett and MacBride were complex characters. As a psychologist, it puzzles me beyond belief that these two highly intelligent yet totally disparate personalities should have believed at any time that they could have formed a permanent working relationship. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that here were two talented experts in different forms of political activity, each determined to make use of the other for his personal ends.

  My first close encounter with MacBride was a surprise to me as it has been, no doubt, to many people before and since. Seán MacBride will always excite curiosity and interest on entering a room. Of medium height, round-shouldered, he l
ooked frail, indeed positively consumptive. But when he stayed near us in Connemara during an Attlee-Noel Baker visit in 1949, he was seen when swimming to have a surprisingly powerfully-built body. He appeared always as the ‘well dressed lawyer’, wearing conservative, dark, well-cut suits. Overall he had a gaunt, cadaverous appearance and his sallow complexion gave him a Mediterranean look. His curved crescent-shaped nose suggested a distinctly Middle Eastern appearance, and left an impression of foreignness. He could have modelled for a powerful Epstein head of a man who had suffered much. The mouth was well-shaped, thin-lipped, and obstinate — a dangerous man to cross! His rare smile was a momentary muscular response, as used by a well-mannered diplomat; it did not infuse a sense of warmth, nor was it ever completely reassuring.

  To the Irish electorate, Seán MacBride was the unknown mysterious figure. He had all the personal charisma of the ex-prisoner legendary gunman ‘on the run’, who was also the son of an executed martyr to the cause of Irish Republicanism, and the notorious Maud Gonne MacBride. What an impeccable list of credentials for a leader in the Boy’s Own world of Irish public life. Though a forbidding-looking figure, he was a man of much personal charm, and impeccable drawing-room manners, reserved for whomsoever he wished to impress.

  As I came to know him better, he seemed to me to be an insecure person, a product, no doubt, of his disturbed and turbulent upbringing in his Paris home. Earlier writings by Fenichel and more recent studies by the psychoanalyst Victor Wolfenstein on men such as MacBride have quoted the ‘effects of a long absence of the parent in childhood.’

  There were few of us with whom Seán MacBride seemed to make close friendships. I certainly did not. Then, neither do I make lasting friendships easily. I have often wondered if he had ever been a close friend of anyone. The unwary, of whom I was one, looked in vain at him for the swaggering, Sean Keating Prototypical Republican ‘broth of a boy’ man on the run. I confess to having been finally floored by the broken English but fluent French-speaking, rabid Irish Republican with an aristocratic half-English background.

  Maud Gonne MacBride, his English mother, once showed me a photograph of Seán as a child over which, for all to see, she had written ‘Man of Destiny.’ His later campaign for peace, following her death, is hard to reconcile with his former violent lifestyle. Did he wish to redeem that promise which, over-optimistically, his mother had inscribed on her young child’s photograph? To what extent was the powerful and dominating personality of this notorious rebel mother responsible for his earlier career of violence? Was Seán MacBride dominated by her either through fear or through love? Was it that, subsequently deprived of all political power — he had lost his Cabinet post, his Dáil seat and his party — he was left with no choice but to play peace-maker? In such matters Seán was a particularly versatile performer.

  On the occasion of Mr Attlee’s visit, we visited Kylemore Abbey and were greeted by the Abbess. There was a sudden movement beside me from Seán MacBride. For a moment I believed that he had been overcome by some sort of weakness and was about to collapse forward, flat on his face, on the floor. Instead, with the ease and grace of a practised nobleman at the Court of the Sun King at Versailles, he slid forward on one knee and gently, slowly and deferentially, bent his head to kiss the ring of office on the delicate white hand held out to him. With equal grace and timing, she graciously submitted her hand to him for his courtly gesture. Pleasantly surprised, I watched the charming pas de deux being performed before my eyes. I simply shook hands with the Abbess in the conventional way, and admired his capacity for the theatricals.

  Clann na Poblachta had its remote origins in the 1922 split in the republican movement. Following Eamon de Valera’s eventual entry into the Dáil in 1927, a section of the Republican Army continued to oppose what they claimed to be his betrayal of true republicanism. Seán MacBride had been a prominent member of that organisation throughout its years of anti-state subversion and violence, at least until the late 1930s. Because of repeated, often farcical, failures, betrayals by informers and the ferocity of de Valera’s reprisals, the IRA realised that with the defeat of Hitler, which they regretted, there was no hope of defeating de Valera. This led them to redirect their energies into building a political movement on the strong national network of support they already had in the Prisoners’ Aid Committees.

  As nearly always in Irish public life, the electorate was disillusioned with its politicians. They had offered nothing but unemployment, much human distress, and mass emigration. Virtually any new political party would have been welcomed. There were also deep divisions among the normally pro-Fianna Fáil teachers, because of de Valera’s refusal to give in to their salary claims; they were ‘on strike’. There was widespread discontent. As a doctor, I shared that discontent; I was especially unhappy about general medical needs and the virtually nonexistent tuberculosis eradication programme. So without knowing very much about Clann na Poblachta, I welcomed it, all else having failed to give results. There were many of my age with a general radical outlook who were weary of the gross incompetence of a succession of civil war generation politicians. If Clann na Poblachta were not quite what we were looking for, then we could work to make it so.

  By the creation of a new concept of multi-party government, Clann na Poblachta was to end the sixteen years’ long hegemony of Fianna Fáil under de Valera, but its effect on the deeply conservative Fine Gael party was to give it new and vigorous life. This development was gloatingly summed up for me by a Fine Gael cabinet colleague, James Dillon, whom I met one day in 1948 returning from the Mansion House where the Fine Gael Party were holding their annual Árd Fheis, shortly after the formation of the first coalition. ‘Last year’, he thundered, ‘because Fine Gael was on its last legs in the country, it would have been possible for us to have held our Árd Fheis in Powers Hotel. This year, the Mansion House is full to the door with loyal members of the Fine Gael Party.’

  Each of us saw Clann na Poblachta as answering our own special needs. The ex-IRA men simply wanted an end to partition and a united Ireland. I wanted our health services restructured. Jack McQuillan, another radical, hoped for a serious land and agricultural policy.

  The first Clann na Poblachta statement in 1949 perpetuated the tradition of an influential leader class in a two-class Catholic state. Hartnett must have had some influence in the acceptance of this statement, if not in its preparation. Since the formation of the state in 1922 a fundamental compromise with Unionist Protestants would have meant a compromise with rigid doctrine Rome-dictated religious and political beliefs. A clearly-stated socialist manifesto from the young party, as with Saor Eire in the 1930s, would have meant its instant condemnation by the church.

  The party’s Árd Fheis failed to establish a properly structured organisation, with clearly defined radical, social and economic policies. It merely emphasised the party’s Utopian woolliness and reflected MacBride’s tenuous understanding of political, economic and philosophical problems. For instance, under social services the party promised that ‘a national monetary authority will be established, whose function will be to create currency and credit for the economic needs of full employment, and full production, and to provide credits, free of interest, for full employment, and national development’. Clearly the printing presses, at least, would be busy.

  Section five went on: ‘the means of production and distribution of commodities, essential to the life of the people, shall be so organised and controlled as to ensure a fair distribution.’ This was a worthy platitude, no more.

  Following MacBride’s by-election win in Dublin South Central in 1947, de Valera called a snap general election in the following February, 1948.

  Hartnett was chosen by MacBride to mastermind strategy; as Director of Elections he was given authority to determine day-to-day tactics for the campaign. Since none of us new radicals had had any previous political experience, we depended on his political judgement. Hartnett’s association with Clann na Poblachta dated only fr
om the end of the negotiating period that led to its formation.

  Whatever about Seán MacBride’s political inexperience, which was comparable to my own, he knew enough to welcome Hartnett’s advice as an experienced political campaigner. They were to be closely associated; until shortly after the formation of the first coalition government, Hartnett even lived in the tiny lodge at the entrance to the drive leading to the MacBride family mansion at Roebuck House.

  My first dealings with Seán MacBride had occurred when travelling by boat and train to London in late 1947. Hartnett had sought to honour his promise to our late mutual friend Harry Kennedy to provide an efficient tuberculosis service in the republic. Using the influence which he had at that time with MacBride, Hartnett had this included as a priority issue in the new party’s election statement. Because of my special knowledge of the subject, I was chosen to travel with MacBride and Hartnett to Ealing Studios in London, where Liam O’Leary had organised the making of a Clann na Poblachta film by Brendan Stafford showing the need for political change in Ireland. It outlined the broad strategy needed to bring about these changes. I was to speak on the subject of our defective health services, with special reference to tuberculosis. It was an effective and enlightened effort in the political education of an electorate whose politics were of the crudest emotive civil war tribal variety.

  The film showed the suffering and poverty in which the mass of our people, especially in city tenements, were living; high unemployment, forced emigration, widespread uncontrolled tuberculosis. In the cities there was a very high death-rate for infants in their first years of life, from infantile gastro-enteritis caused by dirty milk and dirty vessels. There was no efficient health service to cope with all this distress. The inertia of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in providing a service for these mainly preventable diseases was obvious in every aspect of life at that time.