Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  Brendan Corish was genuinely shocked; he was a devout practising Catholic. At the other extreme was Conor Cruise O’Brien, who in a short essay, ‘The suspecting glance,’ had written, ‘we philosophers and free spirits feel consciously irradiated as by a new dawn, by the report that the old God is dead’. He was a declared agnostic, and in the US he had been associated with a number of civil rights activities; he must have agreed with all I had said, yet under minimal pressure he succumbed to the most sordid kind of domestic politics.

  Until I read Cruise O’Brien’s strange confession in the New York Times in 1985 about having been ‘liberated’ from the political process, ‘from having to say things which I did not necessarily believe’, it was hard to understand his strange reaction. I was among those who had gladly and publicly welcomed him into the Labour Party. With his liberal record in the United States, we had hoped he would help to broaden and rationalise our way out of the unthinking sectarianism of Irish public life. Instead, regrettably, O’Brien and Keating, the two most polished and talented politicians I know, failed our society. Their behaviour well illustrated the phrase used by my wife in a comment on an optimistic claim made by Michael McInerney, political correspondent of the Irish Times, following the formation of the disastrous 1973 coalition. ‘Now we have a government of all the talents’, wrote McInerney. ‘Yes’, was her comment, ‘Undoubtedly, but how will they use them?’

  Thornley dismissed my intervention as a typical piece of blundering foolishness. What could they expect from me? His main concern, however, and much to her surprise, was for his wife, Petria. A fine lady, respected by all of us, she was a teacher in a convent school. Now in a voice on the edge of tears that did not conceal a wickedly smiling eye, the artist Thornley drew us a picture to melt a heart of teak. There was the hushed, silent, embarrassed Petria. Eyes downcast, properly penitential, swathed in sackcloth, near to tears, she stumbles her way into her classroom to face not only her open-eyed, shocked young pupils but also her equally stunned teacher-nun colleagues, headed by the Reverend Mother, all of these ladies in voices of murmured horror reading the dread abuse of them by the Labour Party spokesman, Dr. Noël Browne. Thornley pleaded, ‘What is she to say, what is her defence? What is our defence?’ Thornley chose to fasten on that subject which, with socialism, causes the most anxiety in the Republic, that is sex. He said I had created in the public mind the idea that these good ladies, with their brother and priest colleagues, were a band of homosexuals and lesbians who cavorted around their nunneries, convents and monasteries in wild orgies, not to mention what went on with their under-age pupils in the garden sheds of our national schools. All this tirade was because I had dared to refer to the possibility of ambivalent and confused sexual attitudes among some of those who choose voluntary celibacy in religious orders, and had asked whether there might not be undesirable repercussions for our children.

  At this stage Conor Cruise O’Brien intervened with a crisp denunciation of the impropriety of the speech, and the political foolishness of the speaker. His theme echoed Cosgrave, de Valera and MacBride before him: ‘You can’t afford to fight the Church’.

  That was my last attempt to drag the reluctant Republic out of the nineteenth century. On 30 April 1971, speaking on TV, radio, and in the newspapers on behalf of all the members of the parliamentary Labour Party, none dissenting, Corish gladly denounced and disowned my speech and its contents.

  Happily I have lived to see many of the proposals which I made in the Tramore speech either accepted into the law of the land, or becoming subjects of mature deliberation and discussion throughout the Republic. One of my most vituperative critics, Barry Desmond, no doubt for his own sound political reasons as a deputy in a predominantly Protestant liberal constituency, now freely promotes and advocates ideas that he, with Cluskey and others, anathematised in 1971 as an ‘insult to the Church’ when I first expressed them. What if Labour had chosen to give that radical leadership then?

  It is important to distinguish office and power. They are by no means synonymous. From his earliest experience in the first coalition government, watching Norton’s helplessness in office and without power in formulating a comprehensive social insurance scheme, Corish must have learnt this simple truth, as had I. Because the Labour Party was predominantly composed of conservative rural deputies, it was a Labour Party as such in name only.

  With other intellectuals such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Keating, David Thornley worked tirelessly to assume leadership of what Keating behind their backs called ‘the culchies’ of the Labour Party. These were the cute rural deputies, Spring, Coughlan, Michael Pat Murphy and others who could, with a practised ease, ‘build a nest in your ear, while minding mice at a crossroads’. Whereas Cruise O’Brien simply concentrated on flattering and supporting Corish in his beliefs and policies, Keating and Thornley appeared to concentrate more on assuming leadership of the rural deputies. Keating simply weighed in on their side, at the appropriate time, and with effect. But David set out to shed the impression he might have given that at any time he shared our socialist beliefs. The ease with which the despised rural deputies survived to live on politically and prosper in Irish public life long after the disappearance of the intellectuals tells its own tale of Irish politics.

  Thornley was also involved in ingratiating himself with the inner cabal of Cluskey, Halligan, Keating, Cruise O’Brien and others to bring the parliamentary Labour Party and Fine Gael together, in anticipation of yet another coalition with Fine Gael. Brendan Halligan was the puppet-master extraordinary who master-minded the 1973 coalition that ended sixteen years of Fianna Fáil government. It became an essential condition, laid down, I understand, by Fine Gael, that before any coalition was entered into the Labour Party must ‘get rid of Noël Browne’. In pursuit of this objective Thornley was to play his own eager part in bringing about my expulsion. The activities of that close-knit inner mafia contributed to the decline of the Labour movement in the Republic to its position today — a fall of electoral support from between 18 per cent and 20 per cent to a mere 5 per cent.

  Thornley was to do his most useful and valuable educative political work while involved with Muiris MacConghail in the popular RTE current affairs programme ‘Seven Days’. Thornley made no attempt to invite me to take part in this programme, until I made a speech in Leinster House which they appear to have misunderstood, believing that I favoured a coalition government. Knowing David somewhat better by now, I knew that it was to be my function in the programme discussion to which I was invited to promote his idea of a coalition. I agreed to take part.

  I was happy to collaborate with the Thornley-MacConghail plan until just before the conclusion. It was then that I decided to call a halt, by the use of a seemingly spontaneous ‘political blunt instrument’ remark. Asked about the true function of the minority in coalition, I replied, ‘Just as soon as we achieve our political objectives in any coalition with a conservative party, it is the responsibility of a smaller radical party to “pull the trap” on the other parties.’ While no one was or is prepared to say that this is so, inevitably it must be the objective of each party in the coalition to increase their representation, even at the expense of the coalition government. During my period as member of the first coalition, I felt no sense of corporate loyalty to the other members of the government, with the possible exception of the Labour Party, nor they to me. Understandably, none of this inbuilt battle for votes inseparable from a coalition relationship was contained in the Thornley script. For myself, I hoped that the effect of my candid exposure of the reality of coalition politics would help at least to slow down the inevitable coalition which I saw ahead. I did not re-appear on ‘Seven Days’ thereafter.

  Thornley yearned for Cabinet office at any price and on any terms, preferably in a Fine Gael coalition. As his speeches have shown the nation lost in him a fertile, innovative and original mind. Together with Cluskey, Cruise O’Brien, Keating, Halligan and the others, he now worked with
a manic dedication for a coalition with Fine Gael. Well I recall seeing his head bounding along behind the delegates’ seats at the Labour Party conference in Cork in 1970 as he went from one to the next in a frenzied attempt to win their support for a coalition. His dedicated zeal was to help achieve this objective for all of that cabal, with the exception of Thornley himself, who was shed by the Labour leadership with chilling indifference when they failed to appoint him to a ministry.

  It is important to apportion fairly the responsibility for this. O’Brien, Keating, Desmond, Tully, Corish, the rural deputies, the intellectuals and urban working-class alike — all shared equally in this mean act. While such a political defeat is a commonplace occupational hazard of public life, the effect on a man of Thornley’s delicately-balanced psychological make-up was catastrophic. He simply could not credit the duplicity of those within the Labour leadership with whom he had ingratiated himself in order to promote and help their joint ministerial ambitions. He had deserted all his formal radical postures and friends in their interests. Those of us who retained our affection for him, and for his self-sacrificing, devoted and loyal wife, Petria, shared their distress.

  Thornley appeared to have resolved to bury himself and to disappear within a grotesquely altered human being. Rapidly he became the direct opposite to the mildly vain, impeccably dressed, scintillatingly intelligent young Trinity don all of us had known. We were at the Labour Party Conference in the Leisureland centre in Galway sometime after this. We had already passed this hideously distorted creature when my wife, shocked, murmured ‘That was David’. Between heavy drinking, illness and neglect of his appearance, David had taken on the form which in psychiatry is known sometimes as a variant of the ‘Pickwick boy’ syndrome. His eyes were scarcely visible, buried as they were in the great distended blubber of a once handsome face.

  In spite of the attempts of many of us, still his friends, who desperately wanted to help, David was unhappily inaccessible to reason. Shortly he was to gain the only relief and peace open to him, dying at a very young age in June, 1978. Characteristically, all the Labour Party leadership turned up at his funeral, as they had to the funeral of yet another talented young man who had been expelled from the Labour Party, the incomparable Brendan Scott. Within the Irish Labour Party, there was no place for such men.

  The Labour Party refused to nominate me as a candidate in the 1975 general election because I would not sign a pledge supporting a coalition agreement with Fine Gael. A lot of my supporters were annoyed and left the party, but I saw no point in resigning. Dr Ryder, of Cork, suggested that I should stand for the Senate on the Trinity College panel and I won the seat left vacant by the death of Owen Sheehy Skeffington.

  I was able to use the Upper House to criticise the government on various social issues, in particular contraception; before resigning as Labour spokesman on Health the previous year I had attempted to introduce a bill on contraception.

  The National Coalition’s period in office coincided with the oil crisis and a period of inflation which saw many prices increase by over 100 per cent. The Fine Gael Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, had shrewdly allocated Labour the more vulnerable money-spending ministries without any money to spend. Michael O’Leary was to find himself blamed for the unprecedented unemployment figures, Justin Keating for the sell-out of our natural resources and the collapse of price controls, Jim Tully for the recession in the building industry and Brendan Corish for the total stagnation and inaction on social welfare, while Conor Cruise O’Brien’s mis-management of his Department of Posts and Telegraphs.

  Having been elected to the Senate, I declined to take the Labour whip. To my mind there was a matter of principle involved. In 1977, when the coalition was finally forced to go to the country, I stood for the Dublin Artane constituency where I was now living. The Labour Party refused to endorse my candidature. They used as their reason my failure to take the Labour whip in the Senate.

  That being so, I stood as an Independent, and was easily elected with 6,600 first preference votes. As I had warned the Labour party in 1974, at the final parliamentary meeting at which they decided to go into coalition, the general election in 1977 was a total debacle for the party. Though they had won 17 seats, their share of the poll had dropped from 17% in 1969, to 11.6% in 1977. Thereafter, nothing could stop the continuous, inglorious slide of Connolly’s labour party into oblivion. Its current miniscule 4% of the poll tells its own tale. Both Justin Keating and Conor Cruise O’Brien, powerful and influential advocates of coalition, were defeated. Meanwhile, the Labour country deputies whom Keating had contemptuously dismissed as the ‘culchies’, survived to take over what was left of the party, and finished it off.

  Regrettably, for the second time in my political career, in 1981, on being returned in the new constituency of Dublin North Central, I found myself holding the balance of power in the Dáil. With Hobson’s choice, FitzGerald or Haughey, I supported FitzGerald despite my own doubts about his capacity to realise his hopes for a liberal crusade.

  Because, among other influential people, Garret FitzGerald continuously dismissed the possibility of Catholic hierarchical interference in government as ‘a thing of the past’, I decided to test the assumption. In 1979, I put down about forty amendments to Haughey’s blatantly sectarian Family Planning Bill. It was my intention that were the amendments accepted, our family planning facilities would be comparable to those available now throughout the advanced world. It was as if I had had the plague. No party, no individual deputy, made any attempt to debate those possibilities, during the long period in which I was involved along in the Dáil. There was no woman deputy prepared to support my proposals. Equally I moved a Private Members’ Bill on divorce in 1980. There is no divorce in the Republic, because of a Constitutional ban included in de Valera’s 1937 Constitution. Though both the Labour Party and Fine Gael annual conferences had voted to investigate the matter of divorce in the Republic, not a single deputy in any of the parties rose to support even the proposal that the matter be debated. My proposal was defeated by default. The same was true on the question of both gay rights and abortion. Though there were at the time six women members in the House, none were prepared to claim for women that in such a matter as important as an unwanted pregnancy, women had a ‘right to choose’. Neither were the men or women deputies prepared to support the plea made by the minority churches in the republic that, in their opinion, in case of rape with consequential pregnancy, or where the birth of an anencephalic monster was inevitable, or in case of pregnancy following incest, the right to terminate pregnancy should rest with the woman. I was the only member of the House who, on behalf of Irish womanhood, claimed their ‘right to choose’. It was on the issue of divorce that the minority churches were also ignored, when they claimed that, in their belief, divorce should in carefully limited circumstances be permissible.

  It was soon after this, with the 1982 budget introduced by John Bruton, that the government fell, on the proposal to impose VAT on childrens’ shoes. Considering the multi-million pound size of the budget involved, it was a particularly silly proposal. Yet, FitzGerald and Bruton proudly claimed to have discovered a serious source of tax evasion. As the debate concluded, FitzGerald enormously pleased with his vigilance showed me a piece of paper, cluttered with figures. He claimed that the figures proved that women with small feet could buy childrens’ shoes, to wear themselves. So, since childrens’ shoes were not rated for VAT, the women could avoid paying tax. Helplessly and hopelessly, I turned away, murmuring, ‘Who cares?’ Of such imbecilities are the trivia which determine issues in public life in the Republic — even to bringing down governments. That government could find its way into the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest living administration government in the history of the republic.

  Nevertheless, Garret FitzGerald went on to the even greater and much more serious misjudgement in, unilaterally with the British, drawing up the infamous Anglo-Irish agreement, with all its blatantly unenforc
eable guarantees to the Northern Protestant Unionists.

  After his defeat by the church on the Constitutional amendments needed to introduce divorce in Ireland, FitzGerald must at last be convinced, that, on the really important matters affecting the whole community in the Republic, ‘Bishops’ rule still O.K.’, as I said in the Senate some years before.

  18

  Reflection

  NOW in the seventh and final of Shakespeare’s ages, impeded by increasing frailty, there is time for reflection. No longer may the patronising elders, envious yet critical of the young, tell them ‘it was so much worse in our time’. Bad it may have been, but today’s children must endure the all-pervasive shadow of a grim nuclear nemesis seemingly beyond their control. Samuel Beckett’s bleak truth: ‘the tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, another stops. The same is true of the laugh’.

  On the credit side, the Marxists claim that with mixed enthusiasm and success, one third of the world struggles on towards the socialist millenia. The capitalist world, to a great extent casualty of its own unique scientific ingenuity and greed, is in total disarray. Yet in a stagnating and bankrupt Ireland there is no politics. Both North and South voters uncritically cheer on their team, like schoolboy football supporters, swearing blind loyalty to their leaders.

  For a member of the medical profession and a conscientious radical, the problem always was how best to rationalise political involvement in a society where primitive superstition replaces the mature political ideologies of the outside world. My three years as Minister for Health was a commitment to political involvement. Lives were saved, suffering and pain were avoided or reduced. Fine modern hospitals and clinics were built all over Ireland. The elimination of tuberculosis was achieved and the infra-structure for a good health service was established. Progress at that level was possible through politics until I was overwhelmed by an obscurantist tide at its high spring. By relegation to the back benches, it was hoped that I could be rendered harmless.