by Noël Browne
While I never came to enjoy question time as minister, I certainly enjoyed it from the backbenches with Jack McQuillan. It is a valuable feature of parliamentary democracy; its suppression must be a cherished objective for an impending dictator. Yet question time had become subject to abuse by government deputies ‘flooding the question paper’, thus slowing up the production of replies from ministers. In the past the Order Paper was cleared by the end of each week. Every minister could expect to answer questions, and the real questioners, the outside public, would be certain of a quick reply.
But it is hard to get more information from an experienced minister than he chooses to give. Dr Tom O’Higgins was a master of the pleasantly evasive answer. Dr Jim Ryan specialised in practically monosyllabic mumbling replies. He did not seem to mind whether he had satisfied you or not; looking across the floor over his spectacles in surprise at your persistence, he gave the impression that you’d no right to be bothering him. Each of these ministers, especially when they dealt with each other’s party members, could introduce savage, angry and bitter recriminations about the civil war. As a young politician in Leinster House, I recall my shock at the white-hot hate with which that terrible episode had marked their lives. The trigger words were ‘seventy-seven’, ‘Ballyseedy’, ‘Dick and Joe’ and, above all, ‘The Treaty’ and ‘damn good bargain’. The raised tiers of the Dáil chamber would become filled with shouting, gesticulating, clamouring, suddenly angry men.
McQuillan and I together could batter on the doors of Leinster House until kingdom come and go unheard. It was the only question on which all three parties agreed. Readily they combined all their forces to be rid of us so that they could continue with their prolonged parliamentary squabbles about who started, who won, and who lost the civil war. We were considered to be irrevelant and tiresome interlopers. With no wounds to display and no blood on our hands, we were represented as intruders by both sides. Between them they had created a fantasy world of myths, ballads and questionable statistics, at the heart of which each one of them was a Jack the Giantkiller, yet of that time Kevin O’Higgins was to say to all the bombast, ‘We have not been able to drive the British from anything beyond a good-size police barracks’. Marvelling at the thousands of IRA pensioners I heard MacEoin, himself the genuine article, smilingly wonder, ‘Where were all these brave warriors when we needed them?’
Throughout our years in parliament, there was no serious mature informed debate on the causes for our chronic misuse of land, labour and capital in the creation of wealth, either in industry or agriculture. Nor have we seriously attempted to understand the causes or deal with the gross maldistribution of wealth and the mass suffering and chronic poverty of so many. For all the influence that our generation has had on that fossilised fly in amber which is Irish public life, we might as well not have tried. Too old to fight now, undisturbed, they were content to pester one another about each other’s motives for the rest of their lives. They had no interest whatever in the outside world.
Finally the curtain falls for the last time on a parliament. The transient, ephemeral fate of the actor can also be seen in the politician’s brief life. Following his defeat in the House of Commons, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan soon afterwards was photographed at a bus stop; he had been deprived of his state car. He spoke whimsically of the speed with which ‘they roll up the red carpet’. On the night of my own resignation as Minister for Health the driver of my state car, Joe Shanahan, was compelled to tell me that from that moment he had no legal right to use the state car to drive me home. However, Garda Joe Shanahan never ceased to be the kindly man I and my family knew him to be, and he drove me home regardless.
It was not the unpredictability of public life that most impressed me. It was the ritual preceding the change of government, the purest of all theatre. The last speech in defence of the government is over. The opposition has ended its tirade of criticism and abuse. All sides have exhausted their rhetoric. At last there is a call for a vote. As the vote is taken, each deputy passes slowly up the steep stairs out of the debating chamber. At the head of the nearly vertical stairway to the voting lobby, those in favour of the government go to the left, and those against go to the right. The last remaining deputies, uncertain as Independents how to vote and survive, move reluctantly past the two tellers. They could be voting themselves out of parliamentary life for ever. There is a Government teller and one for the Opposition at each gate into the voting lobby, and a deputy for the Government and for the Opposition supervising the tellers; nemine crede operates here as in Maynooth. They see that the count is correct, and so recorded. With the proliferation of the smaller parties and independents, even the shrewdest of tallymen may get their sums wrong. The last vote is verified by the tellers. Then comes the verdict for which all anxiously wait. The usually noisy chattering monkey house of the Dáil Chamber falls silent. The bleak prospect looms in all our thoughts; a general election, with all its worries, expense and uncertainties, especially for the marginal seats. Some are about to take their last lingering look around the Dáil for ever. All eyes await the appearance of the teller at the top of the steps. Here is the first crucial indication; whichever party teller is entrusted with the tally paper tells the waiting deputies their fate, and the result of the count. Cheers, from one side only, welcome the trot, sometimes breaking into a run, of the teller down the steps, I have seen hopeful shadow ministers ingratiate themselves with fervent hand-clasps of congratulations for the Taoiseach to be. The unconcealed dismay, the brave smiles, the silence of the government benches, tell all.
Yet for me easily the most moving moment occurs in the solemn ritual which follows the voting: the statement made by the Ceann Comhairle following his formal notification of the result of the count to the House. In 1948 de Valera and his government, after sixteen long years in office, were still seated slightly stunned on the government benches. That strange mixture of parties, a coalition of novices, sat opposite. Following the receipt of his slip of paper Frank Fahy, old Fianna Fáil veteran, slowly came to his feet. He read out the result of the tellers’ count, as verified by the clerk of the Dáil; there erupted the usual one-sided cheers. As they subsided, the Ceann Comhairle made his simple statement. He declared, ‘The government motion has been defeated. The Dáil will retire for two hours, and resume at 6 p.m. On resumption, the government will move to the right, and the opposition will move to the left’. With the declared authority of a majority of the people, that formula peacefully stripped all power from a government of men and women. With these words, they had lost control of the generals, the army, the police, the courts and the jails. Taken from them was control over education, health, agricultural policies, the power to create and distribute wealth.
For the immature and the bully the world over, violence is the easiest way. For the mature and the civilised, a peaceful solution, though more difficult, is, in the end, inevitable. If only representative democracy could be permitted to work within a mature, literate, well-informed electorate! It is the preservation of this peaceful transition which is the basis of my dogged resistance to the usurpation of this ultimate authority by a non-elected extra-parliamentary body. Most of us believe that while parliamentary democracy is not an ideal form of government, there are others which are worse.
The propaganda against Jack McQuillan and myself throughout our years on the backbenches was blatant, widespread and insidious. I do not complain about that; it is part of the mechanics of politics. We had to be silenced. It is a great tribute to the electorate that they kept putting both of us back in spite of the lies. That is the beauty of the secret ballot. Once I was at the polling booth at an election and a lady came in pushing a pram, with one child in her arms and another holding onto the handles. Through gritted teeth she said ‘It won’t be our fault if you don’t get in’. Women were very oppressed at the time, but they knew somehow or other that even though I was a ‘Communist’ and an ‘atheist’, ‘anti-clerical’ and ‘anti
-Christ’, everything you could think of as far as propaganda was concerned, I was still somebody who was anxious to help ordinary people.
Jack McQuillan and myself moved probably the last motion to which Mr de Valera replied. Many believed that it was probably instrumental in prompting him to leave office.
By accident, we were to uncover the true extent to which de Valera exercised personal control over the Irish Press group of newspapers. These newspapers influenced a substantial number of the Irish people and created and kept unchallenged the awesome charisma of Eamon de Valera. They also contributed to the formation of the unique Fianna Fáil ethos of Irish republicanism, particularly in rural areas. Independent Newspapers were just as conservative and Catholic, though not ‘republican’.
Those of our citizens who would not conform to this society could not get work and were forced into exile. Britain, the US and the Commonwealth were de Valera’s parallel to Stalin’s Siberia. Compulsory exile afflicted many of our writers and artists. Pressure to conform was exercised in a hundred variants of my own, my wife’s and our children’s experience after the mother and child row. Emigration was an indispensable policy plank for all parties. The ‘hated John Bull’ would look after us and feed us. Our leaders meanwhile ranted on about the iniquity of the British and felt no shame whatever about the jobless unwanted Irish exiles.
How many letters did Jack McQuillan and I get from young exiles in the four corners of the world, saying ‘Keep up the good work’. What a solution to a nation’s unsolved social evils!
Somewhere, anywhere, just get out of sight, out of mind except for the grieving families. It is little wonder that Irish society wore that well-known contented look on the faces of the survivors, who enjoyed an entirely fraudulent prosperity under de Valera’s benevolent rule. In the Irish Press the pattern of Fianna Fáil election strategies was developed between the 1930s and 1950s, shamelessly fostering the cult of the warrior and the soldier and typified by the nation’s bellicose national anthem, the Soldier’s Song. Having been a soldier of the republic was enough to ensure Dan Breen’s success at the polls; having been a soldier and wounded was enough to last him a lifetime in Leinster House. De Valera’s most telling sobriquet for years was ‘the last surviving commandant of 1916’. I have no wish to denigrate the achievements of that generation of soldiers or the intelligence of the electorate. But this uncritical blind loyalty to the soldier was no substitute for a discernible ideology or serious political policy.
For years I have been pilloried for my beliefs about Irish republicanism and its conservative sectarian nature. It is asserted among republicans that ‘while good on social matters, Browne is bad on the national issue’. My reply would be that many of my republican comrades are both confused on the national issues and bad on social issues. To me, nationalism without social aims is akin to fascism. Republicanism without pluralism and secularism is a contradiction. As one of his devoted admirers, I have always been puzzled by Connolly’s actions in 1916 in the face of his then clear-headed assessment of the objectives of Irish nationalism. He had defined his concept of narrow Irish nationalism which would follow the ‘rising’ in his memorable and perceptive essay on the ‘Whoop it up for Ireland’ green nationalists of the period. It would ‘change nothing . . . The cap badges of the Corporation officials, evicting the pauper tenants from their council houses, would have a harp instead of a crown . . . The pillar boxes would be painted green’.
During the hunger strike carried out by the Provisional IRA in Northern jails in 1981, a number of young republicans starved themselves to death in the vain hope of achieving prisoner of war status with civilian clothes. As a Dáil deputy I was called to support the campaign. I agreed to do so. There was but one condition: that the campaign for civilian clothes for prisoners be extended to all prisoners in all our jails. As a socialist I believed that the majority of persons in our jails were products of broken homes, unemployment, illiteracy, poverty and hunger. The reply from those in charge of the hunger campaign was that the Provisionals would not accept my socialist analysis of the origins of criminality.
Hundreds of these confused republicans over the years have killed or died most painfully in order to re-establish Rome rule all over Ireland. As late as the mid-sixties, I recall that the most noisy protest of all made by young imprisoned republicans was because they were ‘not permitted to attend Mass on Sundays, when in prison’. They also complained that ‘their rosary beads were taken away from them, on their arrest’. There must be few declaredly anti-imperialist republican revolutionaries anywhere else in the world who would protest at such arcane grievances. To extend the ethos of our society to the North of Ireland would not be an extension of freedom. Yet committed left-wing Irish politicians have been divided on this, as was Connolly in the early part of the century. This is one of the reasons why we have failed to build a strong left-wing movement in the Republic.
In 1958 Jack McQuillan came into possession of a number of shares in the Irish Press. He made one of these over to me, the only share I have ever owned, and this gave me the right to inspect the books at head office. As I turned the pages of the great volume of listed shareholders and transfers, it became clear that de Valera had systematically over a period of years become a majority shareholder of Irish Press newspapers. Although he was controlling director of the newspapers, the share prices were not quoted publicly. The price paid by the de Valera family to shareholders was nominal. It was clear that de Valera was now a very wealthy newspaper tycoon. Recall the origins of the Irish Press: £1 shares were sold to Irish republicans, the poorest section of the population, who bought them in the patriotic belief that their newspaper would be used to penetrate and destroy what Griffith called ‘the paper wall around Ireland’. Of greater importance was their hope that through the Press newspapers enlightened education would help our people to understand and enjoy the benefits of a pluralist, egalitarian republicanism.
McQuillan and I decided to raise the matter of our surprising discoveries in the Dáil. In spite of our nominally extensive rights under Standing Orders, no matter how we framed the questions to the Taoiseach we were refused permission to table them. The Ceann Comhairle, Paddy Hogan, a Labour deputy from Co Clare, having no wish to antagonise de Valera supporters in the constituency he shared with him, protected de Valera from embarrassing questions. Finally we were compelled to frame a motion for debate in the Dáil. This is a much slower process and had to wait for over a year, but finally the debate took place. It is of interest to note that since that episode the three main parties have deprived private deputies of this valuable right to table a motion on an important issue. Instead, at least seven signatories to the motion are needed.
The Dáil chamber was crowded for the debate. The opposition appeared to be surprised and shocked by the disclosures made by us about de Valera’s questionable behaviour in accumulating majority share holdings of the newspapers in this way. We made the case that it must be onerous to the point of impossible for Mr de Valera to carry out his duties as Taoiseach and at the same time be responsible for the day-to-day control of three national newspapers. Somewhat extravagantly, since we had a mere handful of shares, we claimed that there was a danger that if he continued in these posts, either the newspapers or the country must be mis-managed.
A much more compelling argument concerned de Valera’s notorious ambivalence about the illegal use of force. The whole of the back page of the Sunday Press carried gruesome scarlet colour cartoons illustrating the valorous deeds of republican violence during the Anglo-Irish and the civil wars. There were the bombed and burned-out buildings, the dead civilians, the dead soldiers, the dead policemen bleeding in the gutters. Meanwhile the brave killers disappeared with smoking revolvers to their own greater glory and safe seats in Leinster House for life. De Valera could not disown personal responsibility for these warlike pictures; under his carefully drafted articles of association, he was personally responsible for all editorial and administrati
ve policy.
We went on to claim that these cartoons and their contents constituted a direct glorification of war, and were an indirect incitement to murderous IRA killings and bombings in the North of Ireland and Britain. An even more grotesque feature was that on the front pages of the same papers were lists of names of young ‘republicans’ interned without trial by de Valera in the Curragh.
De Valera left the chamber soon after the start of the debate, leaving the case for the defence to be made by MacEntee. He later returned and, as reported in the Dáil records, put forward a limp defence for his anomalous position.
Possibly the most significant event of that night’s debate was the behaviour of Fine Gael, in particular Richard Mulcahy. Ever since the bitter civil war split, nothing had united de Valera and Mulcahy more consistently than their determination to resist the pernicious doctrine of radical French republicanism preached by McQuillan and myself; invariably and consistently they united to vote down our radical proposals. Not so tonight, however.
Mulcahy and his followers could not ignore this shameful betrayal of shareholders’ trust by de Valera. For the first time, and no doubt hating it, Mulcahy and Fine Gael decided to join us in the voting lobbies. It was a considerable triumph for us, especially since de Valera was heard to complain to Mulcahy, ‘I did not believe that you would do this to me’. The national press, as is their wont, closed ranks behind their ‘leader’. The public, while they couldn’t crown him ‘King of Ireland’, instead sent him up to the Vice-Regal Lodge as President in 1959. As far as McQuillan and I were concerned, he was out of harm’s way at last.
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Psychiatric Practice