by Noël Browne
With hindsight, and access to Irish and US State papers, we may attempt to puzzle over the private workings of Seán MacBride’s mind which led to his strange nomination to the Clann na Poblachta Senate seat of a former British Army officer, the Protestant northerner Captain Denis Ireland. Until the announcement of this name MacBride had remained secretive about his plans.
Taken on its own this appointment was surprising. It is true that Ireland had edited a cross-cultural journal in the North, yet what had he ever said or done which fitted him for the position while the hard-working and experienced Noel Hartnett clearly stood in line for the appointment? Republicans, including MacBride, had shown their distaste for Irishmen such as McQuillan who in their opinion had been disloyal to the Republic by joining Ireland’s national army. What then about the loyalty of an Irish officer in a British regiment? What did Captain Ireland know about the social, agricultural and economic problems of rural Ireland? The short answer is, not much, but clearly these were not the important issues to Seán MacBride.
In time we were to get an explanation for MacBride’s appointment of Denis Ireland. It had been made because of their joint unrestrained enthusiasm for the abandonment of the Republic’s neutrality as a prelude to joining NATO.
As soon as Denis Ireland took over his position in the Senate, he proceeded to articulate a policy on NATO which was diametrically opposed to that which we felt should be our party’s policy. Ever since 1939 there had been all-party agreement in the Republic on Ireland’s neutrality. The new aggressive militarist line put forward by Denis Ireland with increasing frequency could be summed up in a statement made by him in the Irish Times, on 10 March 1951: ‘What Napoleon saw clearly from St Helena was that Ireland was the key to the subjugation of Europe, and that Eastern adventures were a snare and a disillusion . . . the best answer to all this would be an Ireland united for at least the purpose of defence and transport, with a centralised Irish command, and within the Atlantic pact. All Ireland available, ports for the navies of the Atlantic nations, airports, and airfields. Ireland would then be harnessed to the defence of Ireland, Britain, and Western Europe, in that order of priorities. That is an ideal solution’. Without any reference whatever to his party’s executive bodies or annual conference, or, as far as I know, even his closest party colleagues, it became clear that this total reversal of the policy of Irish neutrality was to be the newly-stated policy of Clann na Poblachta, laid down unilaterally by Seán MacBride and Denis Ireland.
Few of us took any notice of what Denis Ireland said or thought about NATO until we realised that these policy statements must have the approval of the party leader. His strange decision to appoint a former British officer as spokesman in the Senate slowly became comprehensible. There were those who said that Denis Ireland had been an undercover supporter of the Republican movement. What if he were, on the contrary, a secret member of British Intelligence whose job it was to bring the Republic into NATO? Who was using whom? However, this sudden explosion of official authorised enthusiasm for membership of NATO, albeit conditional, represented a dramatic policy change in Ireland’s defence strategy.
In the Irish Independent of 7 June 1950, MacBride is quoted as saying: ‘Ireland is the most anti-Communist country in the West. It is the only country in the West in which it is not possible to form a Communist party.’ Quickly MacBride’s secret stratagem to bring the whole of Ireland into the anti-Communist NATO alliance was unfolded, showing a complete indifference to the opinions of his political party or institutions.
Early in 1949, as Minister for External Affairs, he decided to set out on a coast-to-coast speaking tour of the United States in an attempt to drum up Irish-American support and the help of the State Department for Ireland’s right to join NATO, having first resolved the problem of partition. This must have been his undisclosed intention as far back as the formation of Clann na Poblachta, but neither MacBride nor any of the rest of us sought support for NATO during the general election, or the authority to abandon neutrality. There is no reference in the party constitution to the party’s intention to abandon neutrality or to join NATO. No public reference whatever had been made to what is surely the most important conceivable policy issue for the people of the nation, their neutrality or involvement in NATO. Had MacBride succeeded, Ireland would now be clearly preemptive first-strike nuclear target in a possible Armageddon.
At much the same time as Denis Ireland became party spokesman in the Senate, we acquired unexpectedly the enthusiastic public support of another distinguished British Army military strategist from the North African desert campaign. This was General Dorman Smyth, renamed O’Gowan. General O’Gowan appears to have conceived a high regard for Mr MacBride, which was reciprocated. He became a member of the party with an equally dedicated single-minded devotion to the promotion of Ireland’s membership of NATO. General O’Gowan is reported in the Irish Independent on 6 January 1951, as saying: ‘Partition will have to be faced as a strategic anomaly. This implies that the unification of Ireland is a politico-strategic sine qua non of NATO’. He went on: ‘Spain and Ireland, with France and the United States, are essential to a properly coordinated security organisation. It is to be hoped that this will be one of the subjects to be taken up by Mr MacBride when he visits Washington’. We were shortly to find that the one-time republican, MacBride, was the third member of this bizarre British officer-dominated three-man cabal determined to take us into NATO.
MacBride began to beat the NATO alliance drum at every opportunity. On 7 January 1949, before he left for the United States, it appears that the Republic was privately invited by the United States to join NATO. This offer was rejected by the Irish government on the grounds that Article 4 of the NATO agreement guaranteed existing national boundaries. Clearly MacBride had no principled objection to joining NATO. In pursuit of his approach, he circulated an aide-memoire to all twelve government members of the NATO alliance, declaring: ‘The Irish government are in agreement with the general aims of NATO’. He then went on to beg that partition would first be solved and then we would join. The State Department rejected his proposal.
MacBride then set out for the United States, where his message was, ‘We welcome NATO, and would be grateful if we could find ourselves in a position of being able to give it unqualified and unreserved support’. He added wistfully, ‘We have no steel, and we would need arms for our defence’. On 16 April 1949 he visited the White House, where he was received by Dean Acheson, given a three-quarters-of-an-hour interview, and photographed. Once again MacBride offered Ireland as an all-purpose unsinkable army, navy and air-force base, in exchange for help with the partition problem. The State Department politely told him that ‘they were not interested’. It is of interest to note that on 22 March 1949, de Valera also said that ‘he too would advocate joining NATO, if Ireland were united’.
The relationship between MacBride and Hartnett at this time was one of growing mistrust. Yet there was a strange interlude in their relationship before the final break, on the Irish republican politician’s ritual drum-beating, begging-bowl visit to Ireland’s permanent ‘wailing wall’, the Irish in America. Needing a speech-writer for the kind of nostalgic rhetoric enjoyed by American-Irish republicans, MacBride took Hartnett. Though he had lost his fervent esteem for de Valera, Fianna Fáil and the Irish language, Hartnett still retained all his sentimental Kerry republicanism, and enjoyed that kind of speech-writing. All went well with the two of them for the first half of the tour at least. Hartnett wrote the speeches, and MacBride and himself appear to have used them. Then Hartnett unexpectedly returned to Dublin alone. It appears that there had been a blazing row with MacBride but it is uncertain precisely what happened; Hartnett told me that MacBride had disapproved of the aggressively republican tone of the scripts and had refused to use them. Sometime later, though he never withdrew the first explanation, Hartnett also claimed to have been disturbed to find that, while ostensibly making the ritual tour of the Irish American grou
ps, Seán MacBride had visited Washington, paying a visit to the White House and meeting President Truman. Hartnett said, ‘MacBride has been “dickering” with the Americans over neutrality’.
Hartnett became more and more convinced of the seriousness of the blunder which he had made in helping to form Clann na Poblachta, and putting Seán MacBride into the Department of External Affairs. To make matters worse, as the Fine Gael group came to understand Seán MacBride’s anxiety to retain office at any price Hartnett saw the gradual defection of the coalition parties away from the Mother and Child Health Scheme and watched the continual loss of whatever small authority and power the Clann na Poblachta party had exercised in the early days of the coalition.
Relationships between them became progressively more embittered and probably had passed beyond hope of repair. Though I did all in my power to remain detached from their quarrel, I was unsuccessful. Each believed that I was disloyal to the other because I declined to take sides in a quarrel of whose origins and causes at that time I was unsure. MacBride had not discussed his meeting with Truman with myself or in Cabinet. On the other hand Hartnett never referred to it as being the specific reason for his having been sent home from the United States, or the cause of his decision to return home, whichever was the truth. The collapse of their relationship contributed to a great degree to the final collapse of Clann na Poblachta and the first coalition government. Without Hartnett’s political guidance MacBride was drawn into the mother and child débâcle on the side of the Fine Gael party, the medical profession and the bishops.
It was over the disgraceful Baltinglass affair (see Chapter 12) that Hartnett finally chose to resign from Clann na Poblachta in February 1951. While I agreed with him about the principle involved, McQuillan and I felt that tactically he was mistaken in resigning from the governing bodies of the party, the standing committee and the party executive. Reluctantly I must conclude that this was an essentially self-indulgent, petulant gesture on his part. It was ill-judged, and serious in its consequences for those of us who remained on in the party.
As so often in politics, there was an added personal complication, caused by Hartnett’s ill health. To some extent this may have accounted for his irritability and intolerance. When we arranged for him to visit a leading consultant cardiologist in Scotland, there were two results. The first was the consultant’s enthusiastic tribute to the enormous charm and personality of his patient. The second, not so pleasant, was that he considered Hartnett very sick. What came as a complete shock to me was that the consultant offered only a brief prognosis for his continued survival.
During the last days of this increasingly troubled relationship MacBride, using a simple phrase, gave all of us an enlightening but shocking summary of his political philosophy. Hartnett and myself pleaded with him to make some public protest against Everett and the Baltinglass incident; we argued that an anti-corruption campaign had been a major plank in our party platform at the election. In defence of his failure to protest, and in exculpation of Everett’s decision to sack and evict a widow in order to give a job to a political crony in the Baltinglass post office, MacBride pleaded weakly that ‘unsavoury matters are inseparable from politics’. That was the phrase which finally finished Hartnett’s relationship with MacBride and the Clann na Poblachta party. Deeply angered, Hartnett sent in a letter of resignation which he withheld from publication. In it he alleged that Clann na Poblachta, and Mr MacBride in particular, chad become obsessed with power and had abandoned any political or social philosophy’.
In the grim struggle ahead, with all its complex infighting, debates, and decisions to be taken in the key party committees our group was to greatly miss Hartnett’s powerful and courageous advocacy, together with his unequalled experience of such intrigues. Hartnett’s resignation also had the effect of pushing MacBride back into the arms of his old ‘army comrades’ and at the same time leaving him little choice but to seek refuge with the Fine Gael bloc within the Cabinet, who knew his problems and were simply waiting to crush him. For a man of his experience in various clandestine movements, MacBride, with extraordinary naïveté, failed to understand that he and all that he stood for in the Republican movement was anathema to Fine Gael. He had told me himself of the occasion during the Civil War on which a dawn knock on the cell door had called his good friend Rory O’Connor out to be shot by order of General Mulcahy. As the shots died away, Seán grimly rolled up Rory O’Connor’s blankets. How could MacBride have expected a genuine rapprochement between these two widely different sides?
There were many tributaries which were to form the torrent that finally swept Clann na Poblachta away with its leader, but there is little doubt that the collapse of the MacBride-Hartnett alliance acted as the catalyst which in time liberated the final destructive force. Though the party disintegrated, its transient rise and fall had had the permanent effect of introducing the multi-party pattern of government into the hitherto stagnating political life of the country — a modest gain, coloured by serious disabilities and disadvantages. At the least the electorate, from watching the opposition politicians in power, were to learn that compliant Catholic sectarian conservatism was not a Fianna Fáil monopoly. Fine Gael, Labour and in the end Clann na Poblachta too, were to show that they shared equally in Fianna Fáil’s conservatism.
9
The Mother and Child Scheme
I HAD BEEN brought up a committed believer in Catholicism. Both at Beaumont College and at the Cheshire Joint Sanatorium I had defended the Roman Catholic position against criticism. But later experience of life in Ireland was slowly and inexorably to dissolve my final illusions about the desirability of Catholicism and its teachings as guiding principles for the organisation of a concerned and just community.
This distressing disillusion with my religion was accelerated during my work as Minister for Health. I was left with a clear impression that the Church thrived on mass illiteracy and that the welfare and care in the bodily sense of the bulk of our people was a secondary consideration to the need to maintain the religious orders in the health service.
The simple reality of falling religious vocations in the Republic, together with the increasing complexity and cost of modern health care, made such continuing control impossible. The necessity for the replacement of our many run-down hospitals, dispensaries, and clinics was shown up well by the enormous size of our seven-thousand hospital bed building programme. Financially and from the staffing point of view the religious orders alone could not continue their traditional role of caring for the sick, the aged and the indigent; the state had to intervene. Only public finances could provide monies for the rapidly expanding scale of medical and paramedical personnel in our projected health services. Our hospitals were old, rundown, ill-equipped, to the extent that they were more of a danger or hazard to health than they were capable of restoring patients to health.
I had not fully realised the wide measure of control exercised by the Catholic church in the operation of our health services through its nursing orders of brothers and nuns. These were used to staff the senior administrative and management sectors of the voluntary hospitals, the county and district hospitals, many of our sanatoria, some of our psychiatric institutions, many of the workhouses and their hospital extensions in the Republic. There were also religious orders who specialised in domiciliary care of the aged and disabled, such as the Sisters of Charity.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, through his control of the religious orders and in his capacity as Chairman of the Board of Directors of a number of Dublin hospitals, had indirect control of the staffing and the management in the Dublin diocese. His instructions and principles were intended to be observed by the consultants and their patients irrespective of their religious beliefs. I concluded that this was why, surprisingly in a country which so badly needed it, no serious attempt had been made by a native government to establish an independent Department of Health until the late 1940s. None of them dared to interfe
re with or seek to expand or improve the overall primitive level of care within our hospitals and clinics for fear of political reprisals by the church. It was presumably for this reason also that no attempt had been made to provide a national health service other than that made available at the most crude level under the old British Poor Law national health insurance scheme. It was notable that even Clann na Poblachta, the latest and most radical of the Republican parties, in its first Clár (programme) published in May 1948 made no serious reference whatever to our health services, nor did it refer to the desirability of establishing a comprehensive national health service.
Neither did the coalition government appreciate that in appointing as Minister for Health a Trinity Catholic, educated in a Protestant medical school, they had offered what turned out to be a slight to the Archbishop of Dublin, further compounded by the fact that annually from the pulpit Dr McQuaid forbade Catholics to attend TCD under ‘pain of mortal sin’. Nor did the coalition government appreciate that in the person of Dr Noël Browne they had a minister who had very clear views about the proper relationships between church and state in a democratic society.
Little innovation was possible in our health services without the consent and support of the religious orders, and this was rarely forthcoming on my terms. Yet it was clear to all who cared to examine the reality of our society, such as death-rate figures related to social classes, the death rate from tuberculosis and our infant mortality rate due to gastro-enteritis that the standard of care in our hospitals and clinics was quite deplorable.