by Noël Browne
In any of our Irish mental hospitals, consider the number of derelict men and women who for the remainder of their lives, once committed to a mental hospital, are never again written to, visited or released. They may be so imprisoned for life without having committed any known criminal offence. They are committed without benefit of a public trial, the presence of the newspapers, the help of defence counsel, the facility afforded to the meanest or most brutal ‘criminal’. As a psychiatrist, my signature on a piece of paper effectively was the judge, jury, and whole judicial process, and the sentence of the innocent one was for life.
I have sat opposite to a mother and father who had come to tell me that they never wished to see their otherwise healthy eighteen-year-old son Paddy home again. The origin of that boy’s illness had been the father, a senior civil servant with a serious drink problem, who with drink taken became uncontrollably violent. On one of many such night, he had beaten his wife unmercifully and then turned on his three young children. At that time Paddy was aged six; he had pushed his younger sister into the only available shelter, under the stairs, while he remained, as a pitifully inadequate guard over them, on the outside. He had been badly beaten by his father, and still suffered in consequence. Surprisingly, he still loved both his parents, and greatly missed his now grown-up sisters. One of the sisters was now getting married. With no remembrance of what she owed to Paddy, she did not wish her husband-to-be to know that she had a brother in a mental hospital. The father, now cured of his drink problem, was at liberty. If they had their way, with my connivance, Paddy would become a prisoner for life. The father, a highly intelligent man, made it clear to me that were Paddy allowed home, he would deliberately set out to provoke him so as to ensure that Paddy would react violently. He could then call the police and Paddy would end up in prison. I asked the mother if this was also her wish; she replied, ‘Yes, it is’. So Paddy, the most innocent victim of all, was to become a prisoner for life, an unthinkable sentence to impose on what society in our courts of law is pleased to call ‘the most incorrigible and brutal of criminals’.
Equally was I a prisoner of my demeaning job as psychiatrist jailer. I had come to understand my true role; we are an élite, authorised by law to deprive a fellow citizen of liberty for life. Society pays us well and buys our compliance, and with it our silence. I was not proud to be a consultant psychiatrist.
Increasing experience of mental hospital practice left me with the belief that our mental hospitals are occupied by categories of inter-related groups of unhappy men and women in conflict with one another. There are the troublesome children, victims of their inadequate parents and now unwanted by these parents. There are the aged and difficult parents unwanted now by their children, with whom earlier the parents have created disturbed relationships. Their children, who may want the land or the home or the flat for themselves, are exacting their own reprisals on the parents. There are the wives who for many reasons are unwanted by their husbands. There are the husbands, possibly inadequate or alcoholics, who are now unwanted by their wives.
What I found most surprising was that there are few in our community who know as much as psychiatrists know about the emotionally-damaging results of defective social living and working conditions, or broken marriages. Yet rarely does the psychiatric profession individually or collectively intervene in support of remedial legislation.
Psychiatrists are by no means immune to the melancholy for which we claim to know the cause, and presume to advise the cure. In my short few years at St Brendan’s, one consultant woman psychiatrist poisoned herself, and a male consultant, married with a family, blew his head off with a shotgun. Of all professionals, suicide is highest among psychiatrists. Least of all do psychiatrists enjoy the secret privileged ‘happiness’ pill. I too was to suffer an experience which I had not known through the years of my care of those suffering from tuberculosis. Shortly after becoming consultant psychiatrist as a clinician in a high-rise flat area in Dublin, I found that by the end of each week I could listen to no more. In the end, to restore my peace of mind, I was compelled to ask for twelve months’ leave of absence without pay, as a relief from my work.
I provided a consultant psychiatric practice for one of the city’s densely populated high-rise flat complexes, my role being to delude young newly-married men and women, most commonly the women, into believing that I could help them in their distress, amounting at times to near-suicidal misery. For the most part they suffered from, and that is the correct verb, their uncontrolled fertility, with rapidly growing, largely unwanted families. Because of our archaic laws and their religious upbringing, effective fertility control, although readily available throughout the civilised world, was not allowed in Ireland until 1979. In addition, these young couples had been removed from the inter-dependent support of the extended family they had once enjoyed in their former city centre homes. Within the now acknowledged planning disaster of their high-rise bins, they suffered total isolation. In addition both were subjected to the multiple strains of newly-married life.
An interesting feature of their lives, told to me by the priests, was the apparent desertion of the obsessional religious practice normally seen among such young people in centre-city housing schemes. The chaplains expressed the same sense of helplessness that I as a psychiatrist also felt. The psychiatrist must listen to tales of the unrelieved frustration of young men and women, and to their futile attempts to sublimate, understand or exorcise the unexpected venom and explosive hate of their conflict-torn disturbed relationships. It was hard to believe that acts of ugly, painful violence which they claimed were uncontrollable could be used by one young person on another. Why and what were their origins in these two recently-loving human beings? How had they been so damaged by their life experience at home, at work or in their marriage? To the young girl with the bruised nose and eye, my question, ‘Why not leave him?’ expressed my own futility and inability to help her. Her reply was, ‘How can I?’ She already had one infant and was expecting another; she had nowhere to go. She was captive and caged, for life. The sadistic husband realised that his new young bride had become his helpless plaything. Recommending recourse to the police, I was told that in our society ‘the gardai will not interfere in a marital domestic quarrel’. Such a defenceless mother and her children have no refuge. Each baby for her becomes one other helpless dependent, a trap for the conscientious mother, and well does the husband come to know this.
Some years ago a young psychologist, the late Ian Hart, carried out a survey on behalf of the Department of Psychology at the Eastern Health Board. Its purpose was to establish projections for probable criminality, among children born in poor circumstances. I recall a senior psychologist assuring me that the conclusions disclosed in the paper proved that, without doubt, ‘because of increasing criminality among Dublin working class children from such areas, in five to ten years’ time Dublin will become as lawless as New York, they’ll march on Dublin’. Characteristic of the deceit among those who lead our society was the fact that this revealing survey, with all its frightening human and social implications at so many levels, was suppressed. In spite of repeated parliamentary questions by myself, as far as I know it was never publicised. Certainly no attempt was made to take successful remedial action on its implications or to change that poisonous environment. Now crime reports in our daily papers validate that young psychologist’s grim forebodings and the findings of his survey.
16
The Left in Ireland
IT WAS difficult for people of left-wing political views to gain public support in the Ireland of the 1950s and early 1960s. Since the Communists could make no progress because of the active opposition of the government, they were compelled to adopt three broad stratagems. One was for certain members to fade into various key activities in society, and ‘wait’. They infiltrated the Labour Party, the trade union movement, radio, newspapers and similar sources of influence. Then there were committed Communists, entirely ineffective pe
ople, such as Mick O’Riordan, Seán Murray, Nicholas Boran, Seán Nolan, Peter Connolly, Tom Waters, and Betty Sinclair of Belfast. They remained on the surface but were so harassed by the authorities that they could not hope to form a mass movement. They did launch the valuable New Books in 1942, leading to the publication of Connolly’s writings as well as those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other socialist works.
There was a third Communist group whose function was to enter emergent and even competing left-wing groups as ‘sleepers’ to practice ‘fraction work’, to cause a split in the new group and so eliminate it. From my memories of a small book which circulated to certain members of the Cabinet, I knew that nearly every active Communist group was either infiltrated by or was well known to the police. It came as an embarrassment, for instance, to Seán MacBride to find that the Special Branch had a sixteen millimetre film of Peadar Cowan, a Clann na Poblachta deputy, entering the Communist bookshop in Pearse Street. The camera was clearly in a permanent position and used strictly for surveillance.
May Keating was one of the most valuable supporters in the small group of like-minded people who worked with me for many years on the left in Ireland. She was a marxist, and a dedicated worker for revolutionary change in Irish society. She held the belief that western society had entered into a post-Christian phase, and that control of education must be taken from the Church as an indispensable first step towards revolutionary change.
It was May Keating’s job with our group to make sure that the practice of ‘sleeper’ members of the Communist party should not jeopardise my position as a politician in Leinster House. My opponents in all three parties in Leinster House frequently accused me of ‘being a Communist’, a politically damaging charge. Those who used this tactic most frequently were Seán MacEntee, Charles Haughey and Brian Lenihan, and some rank-and-file members of Fine Gael. The Fine Gael leadership at no time made such a claim. It clearly carried its own invalidity; if unwittingly I became associated with a Communist known only to the police, then the Fianna Fáil minister in the Dáil would have been glad to give the House chapter and verse about my ‘Communist allies’.
In 1958 I was told that May Keating’s son, Justin, who at that time was associated with the British Young Communists, had been nominated to act as editor of a small left-wing paper, The Plough, with which I was associated. I resented the fact that I had not been consulted about the advisability of giving her son a piggy-back into Irish public life. Justin, having sown his political wild oats in the Communist Party, now wished to ‘repent’ and find his way into the Labour Party. Like young Jim Larkin before him, he became its most notorious ‘right wing’ disciplinarian. Life under unending pressure from the right was hard enough, without this troublesome harassment from the left. I made a speech in November condemning the use of ‘sleepers’ by the Communists, and broke with May Keating.
One man who worked with much enthusiasm in support of our joint causes was David Thornley, who had canvassed for me as a student. Thornley became impatient of my independent role; he saw no hope of a political career for himself. It was agreed that Jack McQuillan and I should establish a small radical group to provide a rallying centre for dissident groups in the country. When I did not initially favour the idea, Thornley accused me of thinking only of myself and wanting to go on as an Independent forever, which was quite untrue; I felt that I was not leader material. However, since Jack wouldn’t be leader and there was nobody else, I became leader of the National Progressive Democratic Party (NPD), which was founded in May 1958.
There are those who dismiss politicians as an easy-living, self-indulgent breed of parasites. Generally, that is a misconceived belief; whatever their motives, there are those who suffer. David Thornley was eventually to offer his fine talents and many gifts of intellect to that party which claims to be the most caring of the three major parties, the Irish Labour Party. During his time in that party, working class, aristocrats, intellectuals and rural deputies alike combined to shred and then pulverise that fine intelligence with a special competence which only the Irish Labour Party has acquired over the years.
What was the irresistible force which compelled Thornley to desert his role as a talented university teacher, a stimulating public affairs broadcaster, and a contented family man, for the painful disappointment and tragedy of his subsequent life in politics? It would seem that the attraction of being an historian was not equal to that of the prestige and power of a successful politician and statesman. At one stage, to judge by his reading, he became fascinated to an unusual degree by the development of Hitler and the Nazi movement in Germany. It later transpired that the equally messianic romantic, Patrick Pearse, was his special hero. For a boy educated in an English public school, Thornley was surprisingly obsessed with the cause of Ireland’s freedom, denied to her by the ‘perfidious British’. Pearse, Brugha, MacBride, Larkin, de Valera and others, all more Irish than the Irish, would well repay a separate psychological study. Thornley was a passionately patriotic Irishman. Although increasingly he came to protest his left-wing socialist beliefs, he was never more than an old-fashioned liberal. As with so many liberals, under pressure Thornley was capable of ruthless beliefs and practices where his opponents were concerned.
Thornley was a non-Marxist; he had made a thorough study of Marxist writings, and remained unconvinced. In spite of diligent attempts to do so, he rarely succeeded in empathising with the working classes whose cause he professed to espouse. He disliked the sordid milieu of working-class life, and with a strange lack of logic, he appeared to attribute to the working classes themselves a measure of the blame for their social conditions.
It is conceivable that Thornley’s instinctive alienation from the working class was reflected by the powerful barrier created by the way he spoke. Although gifted with a fine musical talent, he made no attempt to rid himself of what even in the British House of Lords would have been considered a striking upper-crust accent. Could it be that he affected the accent to antagonise those whom he instinctively wished to ignore or drive away?
Thornley wrote an illuminating monograph on Pearse, from which there is no doubt that he believed he and Pearse had much in common, with their half-English origins, their sexual ambivalence and their shared obsession with violence. Incredibly for a man of his sensitivity and intelligence, Thornley was proud of his boxing skills; a study of his later life would suggest that he even shared the strange driving death-wish of his admired hero. Following the funerals of dead republican comrades, he was always prepared to sing in his fine baritone voice. His favourite ballads were either the lachrymose dirges for our patriot dead or the aggressively militant jingoistic battle songs of the Republic.
Thornley was fascinated by guns, particularly hand-guns. Once during a blood transfusion session at Leinster House, he caused much embarrassment when a large loaded revolver fell from his pocket as he lay on the couch to give his pint of blood. Therein lay the paradox of the generous but violent child that he was. Thornley was later to be in trouble with the Labour Party over his appearance on a ‘Provo’ platform during the bogus hunger strike of the presently hale and healthy half-English romantic republican, Seán MacStiofáin. At a Labour parliamentary party meeting, I well recall him making an impassioned appeal to us about the problem of eating his Sunday chicken dinner while MacStiofáin lay alone on his bed in the Mater hospital. It was wasted on that roomful. Thornley was a devout practising Catholic, and proud of his faith. Irreverently he would claim, ‘I am prepared to wave my rosary beads with the best of them’. He had limitless personal charm. Though frequently I knew he was in the process of attempting to subvert my political career, I found him to be an entertaining and likeable person. He was ambitious but his ambition was turned inwards on his own clamouring need for reassurance and recognition. With his family he worked with unselfish efficiency in Dublin South-East to secure my election and re-election.
More and more, however, his sole preoccupation became his own political future.
In the distinction which I make between those who ‘need politics for themselves’, and ‘those who enter politics for others’, David needed politics and his obsession with his neurotic needs precluded concern for anyone who might, in his pursuit of these needs, get hurt. In time I came to appreciate his inability to control his blacker side, and the driving compulsion of his pursuit of power.
Thornley was annoyed when the NPD submitted Noel Hartnett instead of himself as a candidate in a Dublin by-election. Soon after Noel’s failure to win the seat David, with the help of right-wing allies, made an abortive attempt to take over the party. Unsuccessful, he resigned, and publicly declared his disgust with our politics. In the process he did much damage to our new small group.
Though we parted for a time following the NPD’s eventual collapse (both Jack McQuillan and I had held our seats in the 1961 general election won by Fianna Fáil) we were to meet once again as members of the Labour Party.
Because of a further flare-up of my tuberculosis in 1964, in spite of many invitations to campaign throughout the country, I was compelled to discontinue both active politics, and my job as a house physician at St. Brendan’s. The new young party could not be nurtured as it deserved, and slowly disintegrated. However, this was for me a fruitful period of political development. I met with a group of like-minded radicals at least once a week in a Kildare Street basement. Prominent among them was John Byrne, a member of an old Donnycarney family, whose father had been a driver for a coal merchant in the early years of the century. John had set out to become a self-educated, widely-read authority on socialist Marxist and Trotskyite literature. He had been deported back to Ireland, while working on the left in Britain, because of his anti-war activities. We first met during the mother and child crisis; since then we have continued to remain close friends and political associates.