by Noël Browne
Aodh, a feverent Gaelic speaker, told me that in the early days of the formation of Fianna Fáil he had pleaded with de Valera to name the Irish Press newspaper in Irish, Scéal Eireann or something similar, but de Valera, the hard business man, never permitted romantic Irish proclivities to interfere with financial or political reality.
The second journalist, Frank Gallagher, was an entirely different personality. He was a fanatical supporter of Fianna Fáil and worshipped de Valera, who had the highest regard for him, using him as head of censorship all during the precarious war years. It was a job which needed a particularly able journalist, and Gallagher, if somewhat over-zealous, did it well. He was sent to Health because it was a harmless, non-controversial department under an innocuous uncontroversial minister. We were lucky to be blessed with de Blacam; to have Frank Gallagher as well gave us great scope to do something about the dowdy, unimaginative departmental information services.
The Government Information Service had always been dull, even in its propaganda. Our journalists on the other hand thought of everything: multi-coloured posters, leaflets illustrated with Rowel Friers drawings or photographs by Adolf Morath, catchy phrases and slogans. Competitions were held for imaginative wall posters, one of which, a ‘Wanted for Murder’ hygiene poster picturing the common house fly, was borrowed for use in a similar campaign in Britain because of its excellence. A particularly striking booklet highlighted our building programme, putting across the messages ‘Ireland is Building’ and ‘Come Home and Help.’ Inside were models and architectural drawings of projected sanatoria, hospitals, houses, clinics. The whole programme, with its objective of the repatriation of emigrants, was an exhilarating microcosm of the possibilities if only all government departments could do likewise. We employed Eamonn Andrews to broadcast at peak listening hours. Indirectly the message was conveyed to emigrants through sisters, mothers and wives listening at home. Many emigrants did return but, as always, only for a time. Cynical stagnation recurred on Fianna Fáil’s resumption of office.
On the cover of our booklet we had shown a picture of Cashel Hospital, one of the very few which had been built during the Fianna Fáil period of office. With some justification, although we had in fact included it in good faith as an illustration of what we hoped to do, Lemass (surprisingly, since he was never a petty man), exploded in a protest at our ‘misrepresentation of the facts.’ As it happened, his protest and the heated debate on the issue which ensued helped to publicise further the optimistic overall message of ‘Ireland is Building’. On that occasion I was grateful to John Costello who, on the night of the debate, took on the reply to Mr Lemass — I was certainly not up to that level of competition yet. Good lawyer that he was, he had no trouble with his brief.
A sceptical Fianna Fáil deputy, Bob Briscoe, a well-known betting man, dismissed as impossible our challenging hospital building programme. Presuming that it was a safe bet, he promised across the Dáil chamber, ‘I’ll be the first to raise my hat to you, if you carry through these claims.’ Some seven or eight years later, both of us still in the Dáil, I had the pleasure of inviting Bob to ‘take off his hat to the Department of Health, for work done and seen to be done.’ Our hospitals all over the Republic were there to prove it.
I was interested to watch John Garvin, a Joyce scholar and Tim Murphy’s departmental secretary, as I lobbied and gently bullied his Minister with bizarre proposals to publicise our joint programme — recall that we were the junior ministry. He hovered apprehensively behind his minister, as if to save him from doing something silly. I would like to have known his private beliefs about our programme.
Sadly, one summer evening in Cork in 1949, Tim Murphy in full spate (which was still mild enough) was asking for continued support for his programme for ‘housing homeless people.’ He was overcome by a severe heart attack, and died shortly afterwards. He was a good man, and largely unnoticed and unremembered, except no doubt by his own.
James Dillon was a notable personality in the first Coalition Cabinet. For one thing, right or not, he was the only Irish politician who had taken a principled stand against our neutrality in the Second World War when it had been the unanimous decision of all our other politicians. His lonely and courageous opposition had forced his resignation from the Fine Gael party. Though I, as a doctor, volunteered for war service, I shared the general belief that the nation as a whole, if at all possible, should stay neutral. Other than Nazi Germany, no nation gladly leads its civilian population into a modern war. Yet, as a loner myself, I admired Dillon for that show of independence.
Expensively educated, at first glance Dillon seemed endowed with rich natural talent. He was a wealthy shopkeeper and a member of a distinguished Irish political family. He was at all times courteous and humane, and had a delightfully rich, well-rounded speaking voice. He favoured an old-fashioned declamatory speaking style, giving the impression that he was more concerned about how he sounded than what he said. He was a strong Anglophile and fancied himself as the Dáil’s answer to Winston Churchill. A well-read and scholarly man, he admired Edmund Burke, whose regret for the fall of the French monarchy and the ensuing popular revolution he seemed to share.
On closer study it was apparent that, although a clear, reasoned and lucid speaker, he had nothing to say which had not already been said. He was a shallow person, with an unoriginal and uncreative mind. For the most part he refashioned other people’s ideas for use in support of his consistently mean, conservative, small-town prejudices. In terms of British House of Commons politics, he would probably have liked to be considered as a Liberal, but in present terms would most likely be considered as a conventional Thatcherite. On one occasion, with the kindliest of intentions, fearful of my reforming zeal, he warned me against the dangers of making too many political sacrifices in defence of the welfare of the masses.
A middle-sized, impressive figure of a man, who wore well-tailored dark greys and blues, he carried a pince-nez on the end of a black ribbon. His great black artist-style hat was a modification of what in those days was known as a ‘county manager’s hat’. He smoked heavily, using a Noël Coward-style long black cigarette holder: a histrionic personality, anxious to impress. The ephemeral nature of his mind in contrast to his impressive presence was later illustrated by his disastrous brief leadership of Fine Gael for which at first sight he would appear to have been the ideal choice.
On the formation of the coalition, Dillon was already a well-seasoned experienced politician. In spite of his temporary wartime defection, he was once again a respected member of Fine Gael. During my early days I was quite overwhelmed by what I believed to be his breadth of knowledge on virtually all subjects discussed in Cabinet. So stark and clear-headed did these opinions appear that on occasions I wondered if he subscribed to the Reader’s Digest. For most of the early months in Cabinet, his reasonant booming voice would drown out all but the most determined.
My introduction to him was spectacular and memorable. It was my first day in the Dáil; the shattering reality that ‘they’ were no longer the government, that de Valera was no longer Taoiseach, irresistibly percolated into the minds of all of us. There is little doubt now that de Valera was overcome with the shock of it; for the first time in his loquacious life, he appeared to be at a loss for words. His deputy, Lemass, was chosen to defend Fianna Fáil’s defeat; I was greatly impressed by his resilience and courage. Jack McQuillan called it arrogance, and he was probably right. Lemass in his peroration called on the new young government to have no doubt that their days as a government would be short — ‘Government affairs had been handed over in financially sound order.’ Exultantly and prophetically he concluded, ‘See that you hand it back that way.’ James Dillon was picked to speak on our behalf. Bubbling with indignation and the sense of occasion, he rose to reply. His speech too was exultant. It was a celebration of the victory and the meeting of minds in the multi-party coalition. Within it, I felt, lay the seeds of Dillon’s hoped-for one-party state.
‘Doomed be damned to you’, rang out the challenge from our Demosthenes. ‘This government will last.’
It was during his intervention on the proposed spending by the Department of Local Government on local authority housing that I came to understand the hostility of men of property towards such capital spending. With considerable detail Dillon itemised each overt or hidden subsidy provided by the state to working-class householders. His grievance was that these subsidies originated in the taxes paid by him as a property owner. This speech first alerted me to the ‘them’ and ‘us’ nature of the forces in the coalition cabinet. Wholesome aspirations are commonplace; a will to pay for them rare. I remembered that individual intervention by Dillon as a kind of declaration of war on the beliefs which I held about an egalitarian society.
As with Costello, Dillon shared my hopes for improving the health service. He had led the campaign against the authoritarian 1946 Fianna Fáil Health Bill and knew that improvements were badly needed. Costello had been immediately intimidated by the opposition of the medical profession, as conveyed to him through his advisor on such matters, Dr Tom O’Higgins. To Costello, the medical profession were the unselfish workers who gave their lives in the service of the poor. More of a sceptic, Dillon supported my stand against the resistance of the Medical Association to the mother and child health proposals. Dillon went so far as to send a personal letter to me, in his bold one-inch high lettering: ‘I am 100% behind you, Noël.’ He went on to dismiss a ballot of members by the IMA as a ‘most tendentious document.’ I was indeed grateful for what was my sole support at that time, but beneath all the outward trappings of education, wealth and culture, and in spite of his commitment to stand with me against ‘the four corners of the earth’, as soon as the bishops called the tune Dillon obediently danced to it. He argued long and passionately with me, and voted against the health scheme.
13
Independent
PROTEST meetings followed my resignation; the public was more shocked and indignant about the bishops’ interference in parliament than were the politicians. The Dublin Trades Council expressed their disappointment at the loss of the health services. Letters of support flowed in from all over the country, with money with which to fight the election. Within a few weeks, in fear of an inevitable defeat on a Department of Agriculture vote, the government was dissolved, and a general election followed on 30 May 1951. The public believed that the government had been weak and had treated me unfairly, so from all parties they rallied to my support. Yet this is not the stuff of political change. With the exception of Jack McQuillan and Peadar Cowan, none of the working politicians dared support us. De Valera and Fianna Fáil were concerned only with regaining office. Fine Gael and Clann na Poblachta, under Seán MacBride, were committed to defending their position. The rank and file of the Labour Party were drilled into line behind Norton and Everett on the side of the consultants and the bishops and against a people’s health scheme. Among the Labour leadership at the time were Donal Nevin, Jim Larkin, Michael Mullen and Chris Ferguson.
So we faced into the general election. The formidable power of the Church was used unscrupulously against us. Noel Hartnett, my director of elections, was forced to threaten legal action against priests whose sermons were particularly dishonest. Bishop Browne of Galway attributed my political beliefs to those of Nazi Germany. Our health scheme was wrongly portrayed as advocating euthanasia for the unfit and the aged, as well as abortion and contraception. In The Lantern magazine the Dominican Order circulated a question-and-answer series which portrayed the scheme as being immoral and a form of Communism, e.g. ‘Question: Is it a mortal sin to introduce a mother and child health service? Answer: It is a sin to introduce a mother and child no-means-test service’. ‘Question: Is it true that the Communist Party believes in free health services? Answer: It is true that the Communist Party has a free health service’. There was a direct attack on the credibility of departmental staff. We had published an English translation of a document in which the head of the pontifical academy of sciences, the Rev Professor Gammeli, had written, ‘the British national health scheme was not immoral’. A priest at Westland Row accused us of having ‘cooked’ the Gammeli document to ‘suit our case’. The suggestion was as outrageous as it was false; Aodh de Blacam had had the document authenticated at the Papal Nunciature. We had no difficulty in disposing of the lie, and my solicitors were instructed to make the priest pay an agreed sum for defamation to the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose work I admired.
As to the media, we were supported by the then liberal Irish Times, which had a relatively small circulation. The mass circulation Independent Newspapers suppressed our side of the story, and de Valera’s Irish Press Newspapers did the same. There was as yet no television service, and the state radio service favoured the consultants and the church. I was not asked to give fully my side of the controversy, nor have I ever been since, even though I have had to listen to contrary views.
We decided that we should not directly confront the bishops during the campaign. We chose instead to confront the medical consultants. As a final precaution we decided that although distinguished speakers were available to us there should be only two campaign speakers in Dublin South-East, myself and Noel Hartnett. In this way we retained control of our campaign.
We were happy with the final results. Standing as an independent, I nearly doubled my first preferences in Dublin South-East, just failing to oust John Costello from the head of the poll. The first preferences were: John A. Costello (Fine Gael), 9,222; Noël Browne (Independent), 8,473; Seán MacEntee (Fianna Fáil), 8,334; J. H. Douglas (Fine Gael), 710; P. McCarten (Clann na Poblachta), 569; Michael B. Yeats (Fianna Fáil), 2,034. Michael ffrench O’Carroll, a young and politically inexperienced doctor, humiliated Seán MacBride, who scraped home by only a few first preference votes. Jack McQuillan was returned in Roscommon, a remarkable personal triumph for a deputy in rural Ireland. Peadar Cowan, another critic of the church’s actions, was easily returned in Dublin.
Only two Clann na Poblachta deputies were returned compared with ten deputies in 1948. The total Clann vote dropped from 274,000 to a mere 54,260. With 69 seats to Fine Gael’s 40, Labour’s 16 and the Clann’s 2, Fianna Fáil were in a position to form a government.
Even under less than ideal conditions the voting process had shown itself capable of reacting sensitively to the behaviour of its elected representatives.
We were now faced with a new pattern of politics in Ireland, the multi-party or coalition concept of government. Henceforward, the Republic was to lose stability of the kind produced by the repeated election and re-election of a Fianna Fáil government. This stability had had its advantages, but these were outweighed by a succession of increasingly inept Fianna Fáil administrations.
Unhappily the introduction of the new coalition factor did nothing to improve the quality of government. Because of the dominance of a deeply reactionary educational system, backed by a rigid censorship of ideas imposed on the adolescent and adult population, public life proved itself incapable of rising above the conformity of a conservative consensus. Emigration dealt efficiently with both the intellectual dissident and the dissatisfied unemployed. The evolution of a serious radical, liberal or left-wing political movement became impossible. The Communist party, though minuscule, was continually harassed. Little or no serious dissent was tolerated; there was no serious debate on ideological issues. The débâcle of the mother and child scheme had not permanently disturbed the electorate; the out-going government was only narrowly defeated.
It was my misfortune to find that my vote was to be the determining one in the formation of the next government. In spite of the superficial attractions of playing kingmaker, an individual deputy placed in this position can rarely survive the experience. In helping to deprive one group of politicians of the power and privilege of becoming the government, the deputy immediately antagonises up to half the membership of the Dáil, which in turn represents about ha
lf of the electorate. Any benefits to the electorate from policy decisions taken by the new government inevitably redound to that government because of its superior public relations facilities. The independent deputy is forgotten, unless the government carries through unpopular decisions; then all attention is turned on the voting behaviour of the unfortunate deputy. He is blamed for keeping an inept government in power when it would have been ‘so easy’ for him to vote against its policies. On finally deciding to vote against the new government which up to then he has consistently supported, he antagonises the other half of the Dáil, together with their supporters in the electorate. He must then himself go to the country with precious little electoral support.
To precipitate a general election is a particularly hazardous decision to take. He must assume this power with considerable trepidation, and his justification for this action must be clearly seen and understood by the electorate. What hope has he of achieving this objective when virtually all his political colleagues are, or have at some stage been, antagonistic to him, and he has lost the support of both halves of the electorate? I had become bitterly disillusioned with the social policies of the coalition; I could not justify supporting them once again and restoring them to power. Although no pre-election agreement was made, in a conversation with Seán Lemass I was given to believe that Fianna Fáil would try to give the people a worthwhile health scheme. Brian Walsh, my legal friend, was very close to Lemass, and through him we had a secret meeting in a car outside the Harcourt Street laundry. Lemass was very honest with me; he said ‘there’s no bargain, no deal, but we’ll try to give you a good health service’. Since health was the subject with which I had become most clearly associated, and in which I was most interested, I decided to support Fianna Fáil, with de Valera as Taoiseach. On hearing of my decision Brendan Gorish, the young Labour leader-to-be, hoping and believing that this would be the end of my political career, commented, ‘At last we’ve got him in the net’.