by Noël Browne
Early on I was confronted with the cavalier indifference to ‘merit’ of my Cabinet colleagues when deciding qualifications for appointments. Seán MacEoin had submitted a list of candidates with their qualifications for a post in his jurisdiction in Co Clare. I noted that the man appointed had graduated from his national school at twelve or thirteen years of age; he had no visible qualification, other than his friendship with MacEoin or his probable membership of Fine Gael. I protested that this was a political appointment and ‘Fine Gael jobbery’ because of the demonstrably superior qualifications of each of the other candidates. My colleagues were shocked by my ‘immoderate’ language. Unperturbed, MacEoin smilingly replied, ‘That’s not a bad way to make an appointment Noël!’ I continued to protest that despite the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility, I would not justify this Fine Gael ‘fix’. Either they must cease to advertise posts as being vacant, or have the courage to make blatantly political appointments and take the consequences. Otherwise, I suggested, we should establish a proper appointment system. The latter proposal was finally agreed.
During Cabinet meetings I was initially overawed, as the youngest Cabinet minister surrounded by a number of men who had helped to make our history. I was treated with patience and courtesy all through my period of office until the very end, during the mother and child crisis, but I was rarely listened to over-seriously. My departmental work appeared to me to be all-important; I begrudged the time I spent away from it, even to attend Cabinet meetings. I had become completely single-minded about the use of my time. At all costs, it must be used to the optimum effect in winning my objective of a better health service. I soon formed the conclusion that the important decisions which we debated in Cabinet had already been determined elsewhere. Quite reasonably, Seán MacBride was accepted by my colleagues as the senior spokesman of the two of us. In my opinion it hardly mattered whether I attended meetings or not. MacBride did not discuss Cabinet business in any detail with me, prior to Cabinet meetings, nor did he ask for my opinions. My sense of not being needed became strong. It was his custom simply to tell me the position which he intended to take up, and, understandably, I supported him. In the end, the rest of the Cabinet came to treat both of us with equal indifference; when they finally got MacBride’s ‘measure’ they ceased to care much about the opinions of either of us.
The Minister for Health was held to be apolitical in the narrow sense of that word. In the early days and right up until the latter end of 1950, Seán MacBride would appoint me to deputise for him. As acting Minister for External Affairs, I received a number of notable statesmen, of whom one was Pandit Nehru, on a visit to Dublin following negotiations in London. India had been liberated relatively bloodlessly by Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and their comrades, a tribute to the courageous use of peaceful means. I asked Nehru, conscious of our own civil war on much the same issue, if he would not find himself in trouble on his return to India for remaining within the British Commonwealth. Unlike our political leaders, Nehru recognised the virtues of an association of co-equal sovereign nations with common objectives. He expected his colleagues to share his own mature outlook.
Both Seán MacBride and Noel Hartnett were always available to me for advice when I needed to expand my knowledge of public affairs. My great regret was the tragic conflict that was to develop between them. Once it had begun, I found it difficult to believe that Clann na Poblachta could survive.
MacBride wrote lengthy treatises on the many abstruse subjects which attracted him. In his brisk, crisp Northern accent McGilligan, who shared Hartnett’s moderate opinions about MacBride as an intellectual and scholar, also dismissed his seeming expertise on economic or financial matters. Nevertheless MacBride worked continuously from early morning until late into the night. He especially enjoyed the diplomatic dinners, tea parties, and soirées which he organised in the Department and which in his absence fell to my lot.
Increasingly during 1950 Seán excluded me as his deputy, as if to ensure that his authentic voice would be heard untrammelled by any ‘rehashing’ by me. He would scan the cabinet agenda, and on those subjects in which he had a special interest, would submit a treatise to the Taoiseach. In the early days, this memorandum was carefully unfolded and conscientiously read out by the Taoiseach to a politely attentive Cabinet. It was treated with some respect. After a time, they began to notice to my embarrassment that the contents of the memorandum were as novel to me as they were to the rest of them. As the memoranda proliferated, it became obvious that all was not well in Clann na Poblachta; they were now treated with a tolerant amusement, and the epistles filed somewhere.
The most simple illustration of our helplessness in Cabinet was the fact that on a number of occasions both of us argued for clemency for men under sentence of death before the civil courts. The Cabinet was the supreme authority under the President in matters of life and death, and could commute the sentences to life imprisonment. Because of what I had heard about General Mulcahy and the ‘seventy-seven’, I watched his reaction. In his usual style on such ‘simple issues’, he was curt, brash and uncomplicated: ‘They must hang.’ The deeply religious Blowick’s comment, in his high-pitched squeak, was, ‘Hang them, hang them.’ There was no attempt to argue or to rationalise their positions. With their majority they had no need to.
It is important to understand the process by which decisions were arrived at in that coalition government. A Minister who required a Cabinet decision to carry out his ministerial functions would formally submit a written request for permission to act, supported, usually, by documentary justification for such action. Occasionally a request might be agreed to without question, but it was the usual practice for each minister or additional ministers likely to be affected by any decision taken to submit a supporting or a contesting case with documentation.
Such, without doubt, would have been the case were the government to take such an important decision as to decide formally to repeal the External Relations Act, 1936, which maintained the link between Ireland and the Commonwealth. At the time there had been powerful opposition in the Fine Gael party to the repeal of this act, and MacBride and the Clann na Poblachta party had agreed to put the question of repeal ‘into abeyance’ for the lifetime of the Coalition. Yet to the astonishment of politicians and public alike, on both sides of the Irish Sea, members of the Cabinet read one September morning in 1948 in the Sunday Independent that according to the Taoiseach, Mr Costello, speaking at a meeting in Ottawa, we had ‘unanimously agreed in Cabinet’ to repeal the act. This was not true. This incident and its sequel had serious political and diplomatic consequences for politicians and journalists alike.
The repeal of the External Relations Act had little significance for me. Because of the silly protocol under which ‘accreditation’ of our foreign diplomats must in the first instance be approved by the British monarch, I was satisfied that it should be repealed. At the same time, I believed in the validity of the case made by de Valera for its retention in part. He claimed that as the last remaining link in common between the North and ourselves, possibly leading to, or facilitating, membership of the Commonwealth, its retention might help reconciliation between both parts of this country. However, it was a subject with which I was not deeply concerned.
With other available ministers, I was called urgently to a ‘caucus meeting’ of the Cabinet one Sunday afternoon soon after the Taoiseach’s return to Dublin following the Ottawa meeting. Costello appeared to be visibly distressed and unhappy. He told us that he had decided to repeal the External Relations Act while attending a formal government dinner in his honour at which the host was Lord Alexander, the Governor General of Canada. Realising that he had no authority from the Cabinet for his decision, he deeply regretted his action and had called this emergency Cabinet meeting to explain and apologise to us for his unconstitutional action. He then went on to offer to resign as Taoiseach.
In the absence of Mr MacBride abroad, and speaking for Clann na Poblachta, I
dismissed the suggestion that Costello should resign. We were glad to see the act go. With varying degrees of enthusiasm the members of the Cabinet remaining assured Costello that he must not resign. Seán MacEoin appeared to me to be as pleased as I was that it should go; he was his usual pleasant reassuring self in his attempt to comfort Costello.
When I gave this detailed account on radio in 1976, it was at once dismissed as untrue in a series of letters and statements to the press. I found myself accused by my former ministerial colleagues of lying. All of them shared the same story, that no such meeting had occurred, and that no offer of resignation was submitted by the Taoiseach. The ministers concerned were James Dillon, Dan Morrissey, Seán MacBride and Paddy McGilligan. For a number of years I was compelled to live under the cloud of having told a distasteful lie about Mr Costello. This assault on my integrity was further supported by a letter in the Sunday Independent, on 22 January 1984, from Hector Legge, who had been editor of that paper at the time of the repeal of the External Relations Act and had had close associations with the coalition government and MacBride. In an offensive suggestion that I was being consciously dishonest, Hector Legge’s letter sought to reinforce the case against me by calling on what he described as a ‘distinguished civil servant’, now retired, Patrick Lynch. It was my understanding of civil service protocol that senior civil servants do not repeat confidential information for publication in the public press. Mr Lynch had been secretary to the Taoiseach and had travelled with him to Canada, and he now joined the hunt, declaring that no such meeting was ever held.
Labelled as a liar until early in 1984, I was helpless to refute these offensive slanders. My vindication occurred following my review of Ronan Fanning’s book Independent Ireland, published in 1983. The Cabinet papers for 1948-1951 had become available, and Dr Fanning made puzzled references to the absence of any Cabinet papers relating to the repeal of the External Relations Act, in spite of Costello’s claim ‘that a unanimous Cabinet decision had been taken.’ In the course of my review I reassured Dr Fanning that no Cabinet decision or papers could exist since no formal Cabinet discussions had taken place.
Hector Legge, supported, he claimed, by Paddy Lynch, once again accused me of repeating an untruth. Within days MacBride, who as Minister for External Affairs knew better than most that there could be no such papers and that there had been no ‘unanimous decision of the Cabinet’, repeated his charge in the Sunday Independent, 1 February 1984, that ‘there was no such Cabinet meeting and Mr Costello did not offer his resignation.’
Though it took nearly ten years to do so, this sordid episode ended happily for me. Proof of the accuracy of my account of what had happened came from a casual conversation which I had with the political journalist Bruce Arnold. Arnold told me that in the course of his professional work, he had had a long interview with the former head of the Department of External Affairs, Frederick Boland. Fortunately he had taped the interview. Mr Boland, now retired, had been departmental secretary to both Mr de Valera and Mr MacBride, and later Chairman of the United Nations. He was well-known internationally as a distinguished and experienced civil servant.
How deeply relieved and gratified I was to hear Mr Boland say on that tape, in a reply to a question by Bruce Arnold about the unexplained ‘out of the blue’ repeal of the External Relations Act, that ‘Noël Browne’s version of the repeal of the External Relations Act was correct’. Further, he confirmed that no Cabinet decision had been taken. The versions of MacBride, Dillon, and Morrissey, according to Mr Boland, were mostly fantasy. He disclosed on further questioning that there had been no consultation with the British. As with the rest of us, the announcement that the Irish government intended to repeal the External Relations Act had taken the British by surprise.
While greatly relieved to hear my version of the facts verified I did not refer to Boland by name, but simply as a ‘senior civil servant’, in a subsequent letter to the newspapers. In spite of Hector Legge’s jeering invitation to me ‘to name the civil servant’ I believed it improper to mention Boland’s name in public in what was blatantly a political matter. When I told Bruce Arnold of my dilemma, he helpfully told me of one other person who knew precisely what had happened. This was Maurice Dockrell, a member of a former Unionist Protestant Fine Gael family and himself a former TD.
It seems that the Taoiseach had doubts about the political effects of his decision on the Unionist sector of the Fine Gael vote in his constituency. He decided to speak to Maurice Dockrell who could be depended upon to help undo the damage by telling his co-religionists in confidence the exact story, as told to him by Costello, about what had happened in Ottawa. Apparently, at the reception for himself and his wife given in Ottawa by the Govenor General, Lord Alexander, Costello got the impression that ‘there was a certain coolness’ to himself. He was displeased at the placing at the banqueting table and believed that there had been some intended discourtesy to his wife. Later a silver replica of ‘Roaring Meg’ was placed in front of either Costello or his wife. ‘Roaring Meg’ was a famous cannon used by the Protestants in their defence of Derry’s walls against the Catholics during the Siege of Derry. Costello went on, ‘I was so insulted by these things’ that ‘I lost my temper and declared it’ (the repeal of the External Relations Act). Arnold concludes, ‘That, dear reader, is how Ireland left the Commonwealth.’
It is most important to note that this story of the repeal of the External Relations Act is also confirmed by Mr Boland. It was Boland who first brought the surprise news of the repeal to both MacBride and Lord Maffey, who were dining together at the Russell Hotel when the news came through from Ottawa. Maffey was later to be reported as saying that ‘no conversation had taken place between the two governments on the issue.’ Arnold also notes, ‘Costello did offer his resignation on his return but it was refused.’ Though this story was published in the Irish Independent on 4 February 1984, no attempt was made by the surviving former Cabinet ministers, MacBride and Dillon, to apologise for their defamation of my character.
The process of the repeal of the External Relations Act was irresponsible, incredible and ludicrous. Indeed because it was so ridiculous, it was not surprising that my correct version was not believed. It was surely both ill-mannered and ungracious of Fine Gael and Mr Costello to deprive Seán MacBride of his rights, as the relevant Minister, to introduce the Bill repealing the External Relations Act. Mr Costello chose to introduce the Bill himself. MacBride, in a pitiful protest, did not appear at the Easter Sunday march-pasts and volleys from the roof of the GPO trumpeting the celebrations of a ‘famous victory.’ In his absence, I acted as Minister for External Affairs at the circus.
Annoyed by the cavalier behaviour of the Irish government the British, in a devastating riposte, introduced the Ireland Act, 1949, without MacBride’s knowledge. Because of his absence, yet again, I acted as Minister for External Affairs in receiving the copy of the Act in great secrecy en route to the government. This Act shocked the Irish government with its guarantees, which stand to this day, to the Unionist population in the North. The operative phrase ran: ‘That in no event will Northern Ireland, or any part thereof cease to be part of His Majesty’s dominions, and of the United Kingdom, without the consent of Northern Ireland.’ This provoked a solemn protest from the Irish government. In truth, Mr Costello’s Canadian capers were to cost us dearly.
De Valera’s position on the repeal of the External Relations Act was that this last link with the Commonwealth, if repealed, would have the effect of consolidating the border and so further delay North-South reconciliation. Events were to prove that he was correct in his analysis. The British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, said in a statement on 12 May 1949: ‘It was the act of the Éire Government itself, deciding to leave the Commonwealth, which made inevitable a declaration as to the position of that part of Ireland which was continuing in the Commonwealth. The Ireland Bill merely recognised that fact.’ Further, the official reports of the House of Commons Debates
for 17 May 1949 showed that no documents had passed between the British and the Irish governments, and ‘no conversation had taken place between them’ that such a pronouncement was to take place, that the repeal of the External Relations Act had been decided on either by the Irish Government, or Mr Costello. Indeed, they went on to declare that the decision of the Irish government ‘came as a painful surprise to the British.’