I met a rather interesting man recently whose surname urged a question from me. His unusual name resonated with me as being identical to that of a generous family who once put an impoverished student called Noel Christopher Browne through college in the 1940s. Browne was impoverished because his entire family was wiped out by tuberculosis in the 1920s. However, he was determined to restore some justice to the medical and political system in an independent Ireland that had so betrayed his own and so many other Irish families.
Browne has long been an icon for political activists on the left. He was a doctor who refused to practise private medicine. He joined the newly established republican and socialist Clann na Poblachta party in the mid 1940s and on his first attempt was elected to Dáil Éireann in 1948. He became Minister for Health on his first day in the Dáil, remarkably with the help of the conservative precursors to Fine Gael, the Cumann na nGaedhael party. He then set about tackling the issue that had destroyed his family – tuberculosis.
His health reforms fortunately coincided with the development of new drugs like BCG and penicillin that helped to treat a previously untreatable plague, but nobody previous to Browne had ever prioritised this fight. Browne introduced mass free screening for tuberculosis sufferers and sold department assets to finance his campaign, which helped dramatically reduce the scourge of tuberculosis in Ireland. That is his legacy to this republic, but it was his defence of that republic against powerful forces that was his undoing. Ireland simply wasn’t ready for him.
Suffice to say, he tried to take on the big doctors and the Catholic Church over what seems with modern eyes to be an absolutely justifiable piece of legislation called the ‘Mother and Child Scheme’, and he lost in the short term. In the long term he probably set the scene for the eventual toppling of the Church’s influence in modern Ireland, yet he was expelled by his party and spent the rest of his days in representative politics on the outside. He also wrote a biography called Against the Tide, which solidified his place as the conscience of the political elite.
In many ways his story is a shot in the arm to those of us who believe that the Labour Party belongs in government. Browne would never have ended TB without the support of Cumann na nGaedhael in government on the inside. And in many other ways, his story is a shot in the arm to those on the extreme left – essentially the tale of the good man who was eventually brought down by the vested interests, and who then systematically exposed them for what they were. More importantly, his tale is a shot in the arm for anybody who has a fire in his or her belly large enough to want to make a difference.
The new gentleman acquaintance of mine remarked that Browne went to his grave with absolutely no sense of achievement. I immediately thought of Enoch Powell’s assertion that all political careers end in failure. Enoch Powell and Noel Browne had very little in common politically – one inspired emotions of racism, the other of compassion – but if Browne achieved little else, it was that he proved that politics is indeed the art of the possible, even of he didn’t believe it himself at the time.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is a primary school teacher in the Sheriff Street area of Dublin, a member of the Labour Party, and formerly Dublin’s Deputy Lord Mayor. His column appears every week in Metro Eireann
