Noël Browne had a vision for a healthy, compassionate Ireland. The church and the medical profession blocked him

How tragically apt that Alan Gilsenan’s The Seven Ages of Noël Browne (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) should air the week after the death of Sinéad O’Connor. Like O’Connor, Browne, the controversial minister for health in John A Costello’s coalition government of 1948-51, recognised Catholic Ireland as a society unfit for purpose. He took a stand and paid the price.

As with O’Connor, he was shunned because of his views – although, whereas for O’Connor the backlash was a largely American phenomenon, following her ripping up of the pope’s image, in Browne’s case it was entirely home-grown.

Browne’s vision was of a society with equal access to healthcare and where decisions about patient welfare lay with doctors and nurses rather than with priests and bishops. But these were different times. With John Charles McQuaid wielding power as archbishop of Dublin, Browne’s plans were doomed from the outset.

Early in his stint as minister for health, Browne had been at the forefront of eradicating tuberculosis, a disease that had killed several family members and nearly claimed his own life. But when it came to his mother-and-child scheme, which would have introduced Scandinavian-style healthcare to Ireland, he could not overcome the objections of the hierarchy and the medical lobby.

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Bishops feared that Browne was laying the groundwork for abortion and birth control. Doctors – particularly all-powerful consultants – didn’t want their hegemony challenged. Their joint opposition brought the project to a crashing halt and led to Browne’s ouster.

The story is told passionately and dramatically. If there is a weakness it’s that the 80-minute film does not explain the nuts and bolts of the mother-and-child scheme or the specifics of the church’s opposition. But The Seven Ages of Noël Browne powerfully evokes the claustrophobia of an Ireland run for the well-off and the hyperdevout – the same country that, a generation later, would so traumatise Sinéad O’Connor.

The documentary finds its true potency as a profile of Browne, whose story is relayed by his daughters, Ruth and Susan. They return to the old cottage in Cloughmore, in Connemara, where Browne spent his final years at the side of his beloved wife, Phyllis. He had by then lived a life full of struggle and tragedy, including the early deaths of his parents and a displacement to England to avoid the depravations of Letterfrack industrial school. “He never spoke about his childhood,” Susan says, lost in memories good and bad.

Browne was clear-eyed about the world’s cruelty but driven by a deep compassion. “I came to believe that God and His holy mother had an insatiable appetite for human suffering,” he says in an archive interview.

He rises off the screen as a thoroughly modern figure born ahead of his time. He felt that one of the great challenges to the mental health of working-class women in postwar Ireland was the trauma of bearing large families. “The main source of depression was the prospect of becoming pregnant,” he says. “What was needed in Ireland was fertility control.”

The men in black did not agree. When McQuaid made clear his objections to the mother-and-child scheme, neither Browne’s party nor the wider government backed their minister. The feeling was that the problematic Browne was fond of the spotlight and given to grandstanding. “He was anxious to become a martyr,” Costello said. “It was self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Browne lived to 81. By the time of his death, in 1997, the country had crawled out from under the dead hand of Catholicism. Abortion rights were still far too long away, but contraception and divorce had finally been legislated for.

There is, however, no sense of vindication from Browne in the later interviews (which are taken from a never-completed project by the film-maker James Black). Browne seemed to have internalised the sadness that had been part of his early life. It had curdled into an all-pervading melancholia. “I don’t think anybody is ever remembered, really,” he says. “We all disappear into great eternity.”

Browne has not disappeared yet. Gilsenan’s impressive film argues that, even after his detractors have slipped into obscurity, he will be remembered still.