Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  The joint episcopal and cabinet committee also discussed a proposal to establish a new national health council. The episcopal committee laid down that half of this council must consist of members of the medical profession, nurses and members of voluntary institutions. This proposal was also readily accepted. All pretence at being independent members of the Cabinet of a sovereign parliament had been abandoned.

  The Bill finally became law in October 1953.

  14

  In Fianna Fáil

  PUBLIC life for me has rarely been free of controversy. Possibly my decision in November 1953 to cross the floor of the House to join Fianna Fáil was never clearly justified by me, nor understood by many. I was going from one republican party, Clann na Poblachta, to another, Fianna Fáil. In the context of the tribal loyalities which divide those who revered de Valera and those who respected O’Higgins and Collins, and who maimed, jailed and even killed one another in the subsequent civil war, the political solecism of which I was accused seems trivial. I had no blood links with either side in that civil war and could not share their loyalties or cold hate for one another.

  My experience during the mother and child controversy had been a disappointment. The petty-minded fear of Rome gave little hope for conscientious debate on sophisticated ideological grounds. My natural instinct was to turn my back on politics. There was my profession as a doctor, with the prospect of rewarding work anywhere in the world. The new Minister for Health, Dr. Ryan, had given me to understand that there was a particularly attractive senior appointment in my own speciality at one of the new major regional sanatoria just being completed. It was suggested that my qualifications must give me a good chance of being appointed. I had the option of a financially secure future with a stable home, the perfect basis for a happy family life.

  In the long talks we held on such matters, Phyllis shared my own inability to contemplate accepting that attractive option so long as others whom we could help might continue to suffer. As a solitary and introverted person I have always actively disliked public life, with its aggressive gregariousness and loss of privacy. At the same time, I have felt unable to tolerate life in a society in which there has been so much palpable suffering and injustice all around me. I felt compelled to remain on in politics as long as the public chose to elect me, and Phyllis strongly supported me in this belief.

  I could have continued as an Independent deputy for Dublin South-East, but it was clear that an Independent was helpless to make the fundamental changes in state policies needed in the Republic. Our first decision was to turn to the Labour Party, in spite of an atrocious record of its leader, William Norton. With its socialist origins, it had a clarity of objectives absent from Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. In any case, to gain membership of these parties without a civil war pedigree was nearly as difficult as gaining membership of the exclusive Kildare Street Club. My earliest attempt to join Labour on coming back from England had apparently been opposed by Jim Everett. Everett later refused to consider my application for membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union after the defeat of the first coalition Government. Subsequently I joined the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union.

  The immediate reply from Norton to my suggestion that I might now join was that he ‘would never sit around a table with me’.

  This left Fianna Fáil. To their credit was the achievement, mainly that of Lemass, of keeping our people fed during the Second World War. I had got more help from Fianna Fáil in my troubles as Minister of Health than from anybody else. Martin Corry and Tommy Walsh in Kilkenny took risks when the Labour man, Patterson, would not, in the dispute over my policy of obliging empty fever hospitals, run by nuns, to take in some TB patients. The early radicalism of Fianna Fáil had led to a certain amount of slum clearance; they had introduced the widow’s pension, the orphan’s pension and sickness allowances, none of which had been available to my mother’s generation. This was a seed that could be developed within Fianna Fáil.

  It was a measure of my innocence that I stood as the second Fianna Fáil candidate, with Seán MacEntee, in Dublin South-East when a general election was called in June 1954. Fianna Fáil could not have won two seats out of three in Dublin South-East at that time, particularly as MacEntee had just reneged on an arbitration agreement with the civil service. MacEntee’s people dominated the party organisation in the constituency and I could do nothing about it; I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to win. And I wasn’t, although I came within 382 first preference votes of taking the third seat from MacEntee. The votes were: Costello, 11,305; John O’Donovan (Fine Gael), 2,598 (elected on Costello’s transfers); MacEntee, 5,971; Browne 5,489; V. McDowell (Labour), 1,455. Costello returned to power at the head of a second inter-party coalition comprising Fine Gael with 50 seats, Labour with 19, and Clann na Talmhán with five. Clann na Poblachta’s three deputies agreed not to oppose it.

  My membership of Fianna Fáil was to be brief and interesting. I was close to topping the poll in the subsequent rank-and-file voting for the election of officers in the governing bodies of the party, and was elected a member of the Committee of Twelve and joint treasurer. It was part of my responsibility to speak at public meetings down the country. At our public meetings the speaker was expected to discontinue his speech during the sound of the Angelus. He must then bless himself, move his lips piously, bless himself again, and when all present had blessed themselves, continue with his speech. The Protestants present simply waited at our convenience. The level of political consciousness was negligible.

  All my life I have enjoyed the company of the rank and file of Fianna Fáil: they are refreshing, mildly iconoclastic and independent, and given any chance at all would be first-class material for a properly developed society. But they are not given that chance by the leadership. For instance, an attempt by me to have a motion for discussion at the Ard Fheis (annual conference) on the advantages of the co-operative movement was deleted from the Agenda. Shortly after joining Fianna Fáil I had made a speech in the Dáil advocating a massive land division so that the unused land could be given to the landless by forming co-operatives all over the country. There was a tirade from Dr Lucey, Bishop of Cork, claiming that I was a Communist. A Maynooth theologian had said that if the land wasn’t being used you had a right to divide it, and that a citizen had a right to steal if he were hungry. I wrote him a letter, asking if his abuse of me applied to the theologian as well. I was hauled over the coals in Fianna Fáil for this. A big discussion went on which I ended by looking around the table and saying ‘Well, I am the only one amongst you who has not been excommunicated’. And Dan Breen, always a great friend of mine, smiled thoughtfully.

  Another thing that I fought very hard on was prisons. I used to say to de Valera and the rest of them, ‘You people have been in the damn places, I’ve never been in one. They’re terrible, why don’t you do something about them?’

  As a member of the Fianna Fáil Executive I was to have close contact with Eamon de Valera. Lemass once claimed that de Valera relied on the force of physical exhaustion to get agreement. He had a capacity to sit at the head of the table, patiently listening, and remain unimpressed by what he heard from those who dared to disagree with him. I submitted a memorandum which dealt with the many serious defects, as I saw them, in our educational system. For instance, only 47,000 of the 450,000 children who attended primary school went on to secondary school. Sixty thousand went to technical schools. There were a mere 2,000 scholarships to schools and colleges, and a minuscule thirty-five free scholarships to universities. This meant that 90% of our children were leaving school at fourteen. It was not surprising that the one-in-three forced into exile by the failure of Fianna Fáil’s government policies did so as semi-literates and were fitted only for the most menial of jobs. Under the influence of Tone, Fitzgerald, and Emmet republicanism in Ireland was democratic, revolutionary, and opposed to Rome. For a time we felt the effects of the social upheaval in Europe after the French revo
lution. With the ending of the predominantly Protestant influence, as well as later with the death of Parnell, Ireland became intensely Catholic and ceased to be republican. During a period of extraordinary activity churches were built, seminaries established, priests ordained, and clerically-controlled schools built. The lax social behaviour of the priests was subject to a new rigid discipline. A carefully trained élite of religious teaching and nursing orders of nuns and brothers was established, controlling education and the health services. In 1851 there were 1,160 Sisters of Charity among the religious orders. By 1976 there were 13,938.

  A continuous recruitment and indoctrination process for the Irish spiritual missions abroad was initiated. At home there were missions, novenas, masses, benediction, holy hours, sermons, confraternities, sodalities. But most important of all were the schools, under the exclusive control of religious teachers. New well-stocked libraries with carefully-chosen books became available. A printing press, run by the Catholic Truth Society, was established. Comparative study of alternative religions or political cultures was not tolerated. The function of the press, in simplistic language, was to pour out Catholic apologetics.

  The end effect of all this I saw as a child in my own home. Both my parents, while literate, had been taught little except a blind unquestioning faith in Rome. The passive, credulous formula, consistently repeated to us by my mother, justified the meanest of tragedies — ‘It is the will of God, and his holy mother’. I saw little of faith in the power of love or compassion. Fear of hell and an angry God motivated their lives and determined their behaviour.

  The new provisional government of the Republic supported Rome against the final British attempt to upgrade educational standards for the Irish under the McPherson proposals, which sought to end denominational teaching in schools. In a masterpiece of rhetorical hyperbole, Rome accused McPherson of ‘forcing Irish children into the Irish school system at the point of a bayonet’. Cardinal Logue used all methods open to him to keep control of education. The peak of that clerical campaign against better education ended with the threat by Rome to withdraw Irish children from the schools. The Bill was dropped, and McPherson resigned. Quite cynically, Rome had used ill-educated but well-tutored Irish parents to deny access to better education for their own children.

  With the establishment of the new state, the influence of Rome was seen everywhere. The Irish state’s first Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeill, said that ‘state involvement in education was not contemplated’, John Marcus O’Sullivan followed MacNeill as Minister for Education, and said that he was unwilling to encroach on Rome’s control of education, in any way. As Minister for Education Eamon de Valera had once advocated special recognition for Latin: ‘We like to know it as the language of the Church’. What church? Seán T. O’Kelly had the phrase ‘the republic will encourage the most capable men to devote their talents to the education of the young’ eliminated from the proclamation of the Republic. Its implementation would have threatened Rome’s domination of education. As to mass illiteracy, the Catholic Headmasters’ Association claimed, ‘over-much education totally unfits the Irish, if only making them discontented’.

  During my period as Minister for Health General Mulcahy proclaimed his vision. ‘As Minister for Education, I am the plumber who is only called in when something goes wrong’. When compelled to accept lay teachers in schools, the Church insisted, successfully, that all teacher training colleges were under its control. The first non-denominational teacher training college in Marlboro Street was closed.

  With the development of the Irish trade union movement steps were taken to prevent its infection by radical socialist ideas. The Jesuit order established their workers’ training college, complete with diplomas and certificates. Irish trade union leadership has been as conservative and as politically dependable and loyal to traditional class attitudes and sectarian beliefs as any middle-class product of Clongowes, Belvedere, or Blackrock.

  Lemass and de Valera, faced with my memorandum, defended this educational system with all its obvious ‘warts’, and denied that anything needed to be improved. This, presumably, was a manifestation of their standards. Was it not de Valera who had said that nine out of ten would have to be satisfied with primary level education? He went on to say that primary education should concentrate on the basic essentials; there should be no room for anything else.

  Having considered the memorandum, the executive voted for the establishment of a committee of enquiry into the educational system. De Valera did not oppose this suggestion. The committee contained, among others, Charles Haughey, Brian Lenihan and Eoin Ryan. We held a number of meetings and in the end produced a good report, the greater part of the credit for which must rest with Michael Yeats, the conscientious and hard-working secretary. We made a number of radical proposals for improvement. Naturally I was pleased, but I reckoned without de Valera. The committee report was duly considered and its recommendations readily accepted for implementation. It was then that I was confronted by the inestimable skills of which I had heard so much in committee: ‘There is one small addendum which I am sure you will accept, that the recommendations will be implemented when financial considerations permit’. With that handful of words, our valuable and useful work had come to naught; the recommendations were not to be implemented so long as de Valera remained leader of Fianna Fáil. I understand that they formed the basis of the later valuable improvements made by the Fianna Fáil Minister for Education, Donough O’Malley, under Lemass as Taoiseach, in the 1960s.

  Early in 1957 the second coalition government fell on a vote of ‘No Confidence’ proposed by Seán MacBride over its handling of the new outbreak of IRA violence in the North. Seán MacEntee, remembering how close he had come to losing his seat to me in 1954, prevailed on the selection conference in Dublin South-East to reject my nomination as the second Fianna Fáil candidate in favour of Seán Moore. When I refused to accept this decision, and announced my intention of standing as an Independent, I was expelled from Fianna Fáil.

  I polled 6,035 first preferences, behind John Costello (6,918) but ahead of MacEntee (5,916). Seán Moore polled 2,473 and the other unsuccessful candidates were John O’Donovan (Fine Gael), 1,332: P. J. Bermingham (Republican), 1,291 and G. Callinan (Clann na Poblachta), 396. Fianna Fáil, with 78 seats and 48.3 per cent of the poll, formed a government with de Valera as Taoiseach. They were to remain in power for the next sixteen years.

  Once returned to the Dáil I was able to renew my old alliance with Jack McQuillan, who had been returned as an Independent in Roscommon. Our purpose was to harry the government by making radical proposals for all the unresolved issues in society. We put down questions on everything from public ownership of the whiskey distilling industry to gay rights. Lemass described us at one time as ‘the only real opposition’. We were even the first to advocate the boycott of South African goods. We ran a very powerful anti-apartheid movement; there was a wonderful march, a tremendous tribute to the people of Dublin, which started at Parnell Square with a band, and ended up filling the Mansion House, with Dan Breen and Peadar O’Donnell on the platform.

  It has been said of politicians that we act a lot. Actors and politicians have this in common; their lives are lived in public, and they share the experiences of acclaim, failure, excitement, or the misery of defeat. Above all there is the insecurity of employment and sudden loss of a job.

  But in politics everyone, government and opposition, makes up both the cast and the audience in the parliamentary theatre.

  The shrill bell rings at ten minutes to three, and from all parts of the House deputies make their way to the Dáil chamber, which fills with ministers in varying degrees of unconcern and apprehension, all of them fresh from their departmental briefing.

  To protect the minister on ‘the day’. civil servants comb every available source of information about every question. The Dáil Reports, those great green volumes stretching back to 1922 and the Treaty Debates, are leafed through for u
seful ammunition. If an ex-minister is now the questioner, the civil servant obediently changes sides. He collates every word, every promise, every refusal or dismissal as ‘impractical’, of the present idea made by that previous minister.

  Soon there is nothing more to be done; the politician is as much on his own as is the actor with a new play, but the politician always performs before a predominantly hostile audience. At least half of it will not approve of his performance, no matter how good his act. The parliamentary opposition must always be hostile; it is their job to prevent the minister from appearing to do his job well. No matter what you say, you will be told, ‘you could have done more’ or ‘done it sooner’, or ‘why wait to be asked?’ No minister can ever win. The opposition must convince journalists, and through the journalists the electorate outside, that in Leinster House, in helpless frustration, quite wrongly and unjustly in opposition, there sits a group of men and women who could do the job infinitely better than the present lot.

  Such is the dynamic of parliamentary politics. It is accepted by both sides, yet it doesn’t make performing on that stage any more pleasant. ‘Will I get confused, or flustered?’ ‘Will my store of information suffice?’ ‘Have they information which we have not got?’ In those carefree days in opposition, did you make wild promises about what you could do, and of greater importance, would do when you came to office? Now those easily-spoken words come back to haunt and humiliate you.

  The suddenness with which you can lose your job hangs over both the actor and politician. With a handful of exceptions, for whom life must be pleasantly dull, your political existence can end at any time. For the actor there is the empty theatre and no audience. For the politician there is the empty public hall, no-one interested in what you have to say.