by Noël Browne
Grudgingly the Taoiseach allowed my request that I ask every one of the Cabinet the question ‘Do you accept?’ Boldly Mulcahy agreed, ‘He certainly deserves that right’. First I asked the Labour leader Everett, then the patrician McGilligan. Difficult to believe, there was no difference between the landlord and the peasant. Then from Norton, prostrate obeisance. Michael Keyes, a Labour minister who had succeeded T. J. Murphy, was the only one to demur meekly, ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to do this’. But he too nodded his head. Seán MacEoin was outraged that I had even dared to question him. Angrily he blustered, ‘How dare you invite me to disobey my church?’ The hierarchy had spoken, in no uncertain terms. He asked, ‘Who would oppose the positive teaching of those entitled to teach?’ Then he went on ingenuously, and with a welcome edge of blacksmith’s humour, ‘I don’t want to get a belt of a crozier’. The lawyer, MacBride, was concerned with evidence, and no doubt with history. He begged the Taoiseach that his tortuous argumentation, already prepared in writing, be included in the Cabinet papers. Contrary to precedent it was, and is there now for all to see in recently-released state papers. Re-reading it now, it would have been wiser for MacBride to have left his documentation of unconditional surrender to a convenient wastepaper basket, and simply grunted his approval with the rest.
Later Costello was to say, ‘As a Catholic, I obey my authorities’. MacBride was quoted as saying, ‘Those in the government who are Catholics are bound to accept the views of their church’. Mr. Costello shrugged off any claim he might have had to being Taoiseach in a sovereign government by the letter he sent to the Archbishop saying that the government would readily and immediately acquiesce in a decision of the hierarchy.
I made a remark about considering my future action and left the Cabinet room. Two days later I was summoned to a meeting of the executive of Clann na Poblachta, called by Seán MacBride. All that I had done as Minister for Health had been implemented under authority vested in me. My conscience was clear. I was now to be put in the pillory on a series of grave charges; my actions as Minister and party member were to be subject to systematic distortion. Throughout that afternoon, into the night and until dawn the following morning, my good faith, motives, administrative ability and political judgement were to be ridiculed and belittled.
From all over Ireland my party comrades filed into the room, most of them unaware of what lay ahead. With few exceptions, they expressed good will and their appreciation of the work we had done. There were altogether about forty members in that executive. Anxious to wound and destroy, with the black eyes in his gaunt face suddenly hard and unfeeling, Seán MacBride set out to demolish my respected position in the party. He recited a series of charges that were all directed to one end, first to discredit and then to eliminate me.
The charges dealt with all aspects of my political life. But no matter how forceful the advocate, and no one has ever questioned MacBride’s singular forensic skills, even this group of ex-IRA sympathisers needed some kind of proof, if only to contradict the clear evidence of their own eyes. All over Ireland, new hospitals, clinics and sanatoria were being built. Nor could they overlook the fine new health services provided by us during our three brief years. To manufacture this ‘proof’, MacBride resorted to a series of devious lawyers’ tricks. Showing no shame at the breach of trust implicit in the action, he produced what he claimed to be a verbatim account of what I had said to him during the course of a private dinner to which he had invited me at the Russell Hotel the previous November. Though for the most part the account was untrue, it was cleverly seeded with truths that I could not deny, such as my calm demeanour and my ready admission that I had at one time described Norton as ‘a fake Labour leader’. He went on to compound this breach of trust by reading from a document within which he claimed was recorded a detailed dossier of my movements, day and night, in the weeks prior to this executive meeting. Clearly he must have arranged to have had me shadowed by a member of the Special Branch or some such accomplice; the shoddiness of such a breach of behaviour between two party and Cabinet colleagues seemingly had not occurred to him.
In line with the anti-Communist McCarthyite smear tactics common then, he set out to ‘prove’ either that I was a Communist, or had Communist sympathies; that I had vilified fellow party members; that I had challenged his leadership; and that I had deliberately sought a fight with the Catholic church. All these were politically lethal charges. It was the function of his specially-briefed claque of republican supporters to volunteer false verification of the many charges made against me by MacBride. It was clear from early on that the only possible verdict had already been arranged beforehand — I was to be proven guilty.
Having defected on the mother and child issue, I had anticipated that MacBride must now fight to exculpate himself. But the cold venom of his verbal assault on me still came as a shock. With the exception of the unexpected meeting some days earlier, our relationship had at all times been pleasantly uncontentious and even amicable. His near-schizoid transformation from friendliness to cold hostility was truly daunting to experience, especially since I knew myself to be innocent of the many vile charges in his assault. Suddenly my friend and Cabinet colleague, the leader of our party, had become my prosecutor. For the first time I was to confront that other disturbing MacBride of MacEntee’s fearsome indictment made during the course of the general election campaign in 1948.
Shocked by the revelation that MacBride had had me followed by Special Branch or other investigators, Jack McQuillan asked: ‘For how long have you had Dr Noël Browne followed? On how many of us have you got similar dossiers?’ The Kafkaesque-like trial process, were I not the victim of it, was distractingly fascinating. Its tortuous complexity reflected the paranoia, tormented reasonings and unwarranted fears of its begetter. Each time I denied a charge there was an immediate refutation of my denial by a false witness who claimed to have heard and seen everything.
To substantiate his accusation about my alleged Communist sympathies, MacBride read out from his ‘Special Branch’ file a list of the meetings I was said to have had with young Jim Larkin and Owen Sheehy Skeffington. It is true that Larkin had stood for election as a Communist on his return from Moscow. He had been utterly defeated. Having ‘learnt his lesson’, he had long since become a respected trade union leader and deeply conservative member of the Labour Party. My good friend John Byrne, a socialist in the Labour Party, had been told by Larkin, ‘If it’s socialism you want, join some other party’. The truth was that I had met Larkin only once, when he had been part of a big trade union delegation which had unsuccessfully attempted to mediate in the mother and child row. Owen Sheehy Skeffington was in fact a most vehement anti-Stalinist, like his martyred father before him, and the epitome of a greatly respected liberal Irish socialist. Indeed, it was for this reason that the Labour Party had expelled him.
This was to be the pattern of future charges. One of the ex-IRA group, for instance, would say that I had confided in him that I would bring down Seán MacBride as leader of the party or that I would pick a row with the church of Rome, so as to further my political career, palpably absurd suggestions. It was claimed that I had made offensively critical remarks about the republican army and their political immaturity. When I denied these and other damaging charges, the individual making the charge would turn to an accomplice, and ask for corroboration: ‘You were there on Saturday the 15th, you heard — ’ and then he would repeat whatever the charge happened to be. There would be immediate confirmation of the charge from the second planted witness.
MacBride read out what purported to be a verbatim account of our conversation at the Russell Hotel. It has been suggested that MacBride, during his visits to the toilet, took copious notes of our conversation. To my knowledge he took no notes at the dinner table and I cannot recollect that he left the table more than once. He was not a competent shorthand writer. The purpose of the alleged verbatim account was to assert my intention to usurp the leadership of the par
ty. The suggestion that the aspirant to a leadership ‘coup’ would calmly forewarn the party leader over dinner in a hotel is palpably absurd.
What did we really discuss at that dinner? Speaking to MacBride very quietly and with great seriousness, I had made the point that he and his family had suffered much for his beliefs; it was obvious that he was seriously committed to a united Ireland. I went on to say that if Clann na Poblachta and the government submitted to the demands of the Roman Catholic church it would be seriously damaging to that cause. I warned him that I intended to publicise to the full any such interference by the church, should it occur, in Cabinet affairs.
I warned that if he and I could not agree to preserve the health scheme the split between us would be obvious to all. In these circumstances the party must suffer, divided as it would be between those who admired him for his work as Minister for External Affairs, and those few, probably belonging to my generation, who believed that I had succeeded in improving the health service. In reply, Seán turned to me and said, ‘Noël, what have you done in the Department of Health?’
MacBride then mischievously accused me of having ridiculed the republicans of the party during that conversation. Especially malicious was his claim that I had named Jim Killeen as a particularly useless party member. Killeen had been a sincere, committed member of the republican army, and had been imprisoned for a number of years. He was a man of the highest ideals, respected and deservedly well liked by all of us in the party. Much as I disagreed with Jim’s belief in violence, I greatly admired his single-minded integrity, and had every reason to believe that he was a good friend of mine. Whatever I might have said about any member of the party, under no circumstances would I denigrate, ridicule, or criticise Jim Killeen, one of the few of them whom I whole-heartedly respected. The charge had been made with the obvious purpose of alienating me from the executive. Not alone did I lose Jim’s support; his old comrades were angered as well. Of the many charges made against me that night, I will always recall this particular charge of having belittled Killeen as possibly the most hurtful of all.
There was only one charge made by MacBride to which I pleaded guilty unrepentantly. This was that once, in a state of exasperation, I had described Bill Norton as a ‘fake Labour leader’. Close personal experience of Norton in Cabinet had made this clear. The charge was a measure of the deviousness of MacBride’s mind; by quoting this criticism, he sought to discredit me with those who were in sympathy with the Labour Party.
Then came what was surely the strangest charge of all. MacBride’s alleged intention had been to implement Tone’s plea that ‘there should be neither Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter, but the common name of Irishman’. He had claimed that appointing the ex-British army officer and Belfast Protestant, Denis Ireland, to the Senate seat would unite orange and green, Protestant and Catholic, peacefully in a united Ireland. He now set out to show the executive that I was not sufficiently hostile to the Protestant minority in the republic. He accused me of having been politically foolish in allowing myself ‘to be photographed in public shaking hands with a Protestant Archbishop’. He claimed that this act of mine ‘had done great damage to the party, and to the coalition government’. The reason he gave for this petty-minded charge was ‘that the photograph of myself and the Protestant archbishop shaking hands, had been widely published in the national press’.
What had happened was this. As Minister for Health I had laid the foundation stone for a badly-needed infants’ unit at the Rotunda Hospital, which would act as a highly-skilled emergency flying squad of trained nursing and medical personnel for Dublin mothers. In providing the unit, the department was filling a serious gap in the maternity and child welfare service. The Protestant Archbishop, Dr Barton, was the Chairman of the Rotunda Hospital Board, a kindly and gentle man, completely apolitical. However, that I had fraternised with the Protestant Archbishop was one more black mark against me in the eyes of Seán MacBride, and of that executive of grotesquely miscalled ‘republicans’.
Recently released Cabinet papers reveal a pitiful attempt by Seán MacBride subsequently to ingratiate himself with Archbishop Barton. It appears that MacBride wrote a letter to the Archbishop in an attempted ‘explanation’ for his bigoted remark. He protests that he made his remark because I had confided in him my intention, ‘by using the Protestant against the Catholic doctors, to split the medical profession on religious lines’. Leaving aside the fact that the majority of Protestant consultants were as bitterly opposed to the new health scheme as their Catholic colleagues, MacBride made no attempt to clarify the way in which my alleged strategy was to work. Because of de Valera’s policy against employing Protestant doctors in the public service, it is very likely that among the 800 dispensary doctors on whom the scheme was to be based there were probably no Protestants at all.
Slowly my onetime respected position with the executive was undermined at this trial. Wild charges, no matter how improbable, eroded my support. I marvelled at the systematic disintegration of the Noël Browne that I knew, happening through my ears and before my eyes, and I impotent to halt it. One after the other, genuinely embarrassed friends who had been well disposed towards me adopted a new attitude of mild suspicion and incredulity, turning to active hostility. It was hard to blame them, listening to the arguments offered to them and the ‘proof’ of those arguments. They heard a cleverly pieced-together picture of an arrogant, personally offensive, disloyal, egocentric power-mad individual. This grotesque caricature was a distortion of the Noël Browne they knew. They knew that I had always been accessible to them; the visible effects of our work in the Department of Health could be seen all over Ireland. As John Whyte had written in Church and State in Modern Ireland: ‘Dr Browne’s energetic efforts paid off. By July 1950, he was able to announce that his emergency bed programme was almost complete. Two thousand extra beds had been provided in a little over two years for TB patients. The TB death rate came tumbling down. These were spectacular achievements.’ Professor Whyte concluded: ‘Of all the members of the inter-party government, Dr Browne seemed to produce the most in the way of definite results.’
Desperate attempts to save the party came from all over the room, to avoid the inevitable split. MacBride’s main charge had been disloyalty to the leader. I had denied this charge. There was an appeal for a vote of loyalty to the leader. In reply, I repeatedly asked both the genuinely concerned and those with mischievous intent whether this vote of loyalty meant that I would be compelled to accept the Church of Rome’s right to tell our government to drop the health scheme. Did this motion, if passed, mean that as their Minister for Health I must then introduce the means test into the mother and child health scheme? If their answer to this question was yes, my answer was ‘I won’t support the motion’.
As the night wore on, I adopted my own formula for survival. I would not promise uncritical, unquestioned loyalty to any man. Men change, principles are constant. This became the final fixed theme on my answers to the many questions, motions, and resolutions put to me. Until the Oireachtas changed the law which empowered me, as their Minister for Health, to introduce a free no-means-test mother and child health scheme, I would and must implement that law.
Martin O Cadhain, who at one time had been an active member of the republican army council and had also been one of de Valera’s internees in the Curragh, told me later that on reading about the trial in the newspapers, he was reminded of his time in the republican movement. When a member of the republican army was courtmartialed on a capital charge because of his disloyalty to the army or to the leader, or because of alleged informer activities, there was an eerie substitute for the ritual black cap of the civil courts. The president of the court would deliberately tap out his cigarette into the ashtray in front of him, while steadily eyeing the unfortunate wretch before the court. This Neroesque gesture signalled to the executioners present that the victim had been found guilty of the stated charge. The man was then taken out, allowed to make his
peace with God, and summarily shot. Martin consoled me: ‘If that trial had taken place, and you a member of the republican army, you would have lost the back of your skull on the top of the Feather Bed mountains’.
The vote was taken by the Clann na Poblachta executive. With three honourable exceptions, i.e. Jack McQuillan, Con Lucey and Dermot Corcoran, the executive voted to support MacBride’s condemnation of their Minister for Health. There was no need for MacBride publicly to act as personal political executioner on his former colleague. The executive meeting had taken the matter conveniently out of his hands. He could now play the role of democratic party leader, reluctantly enforcing the wishes of his executive to sack his Cabinet colleague.
Meanwhile there was a surprise intervention by a trade union delegation. There was a possibility that the ‘nominal charge’ peace proposal might be acceptable to the hierarchy. This formula represented a compromise: in order to put herself in benefit, the mother simply paid a ten-shilling fee. I was satisfied with such a settlement. I did not wish to bring down a government, but I did want to save a fine health scheme. I made it clear that if we could come to a reasonable compromise, we would do so, but the no-means-test principle would have to be left intact.
MacBride, impatient to be rid of me, called for my resignation before any further action could be taken. It is a significant indication of the class origins of the Cabinet that while willing to accept the dictat of the bishops, they were indignant that they should be asked seriously to consider this attempt at mediation by the trade union movement.
On 10 April 1951, MacBride delivered to me personally a letter demanding that I resign my post as Minister for Health forthwith. He had thus ensured the collapse of the Coalition government, his own political death warrant and the disappearance of Clann na Poblachta.