Noel Browne was an ideological and political hero to a generation of Irish people; his mythic quarrel with an overbearing medical profession and an even more overbearing Catholic ecclesiastical establishment became a popular truth in the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s. His autobiography, Against the Tide, was a runaway bestseller, establishing records for Irish publishers. Even those who disapproved of his political opinions or his political style tended to express their dissent from the consensus in muted form: Browne was a hero.
John Horgan has written a fascinating, sympathetic and revealing biography of Browne which both reduces him from mythic to human proportions and gives the reader a glimpse of Browne as an attractive, tortured and contradictory human being. He is popularly remembered as the leader of a campaign to eliminate tuberculosis in Ireland, but he was often at loggerheads with those doctors and other scientists who were also working to eliminate that scourge. He was brave, and extraordinarily quarrelsome; this reviewer remembers Browne as a kind and courteous man, as do hundreds of his patients over the years; others remember him as a man who could turn on his allies and friends in a hurtful and unpredictable way. His autobiography is full of vicious and often untrue sketches of colleagues who in some way offended him. Horgan documents this brilliantly and sympathetically.
Browne emerges as an agonised and impassioned man. Looming over his whole life was the curse of TB; both of his parents and two of his sisters died of this disease, one that is now almost unknown in Ireland, or, if spotted, is usually rapidly cured. To be of a "tubercular family" was almost to be a pariah in some quarters. As Horgan relates " . . . His oldest sister, Eileen, who had been a pivotal figure in the move to London and indeed had acted as a surrogate mother to the entire family in the 1930s, had developed a severe case of TB. She was sent first to a sanatorium in Hazlemere, in Sussex, and then, in search of purer air, to an Italian sanatorium. By then her disease was far too advanced for any treatment, and she died in 1937. "
Browne's parents were not impoverished; his father had been an RIC constable, a fact glossed over by the son, and later an officer of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Browne seems to have inherited some of his passionate dedication to the protection of the poor and the vulnerable young from his father, much as his obsession with the elimination of TB was derived from the tragic history of his family. Browne had his secondary education in England at a privileged school, due to the generosity of a well-off Irish Catholic family with English connections, the Chances of Dartry in Dublin. Photographs of the young Browne in the book indicate a handsome and athletic young man up to the point when he was himself stricken by the family disease.
Browne was quite the insurrectionist republican as well as being a pro-Soviet socialist. He grew out of the former ideological stance, but never out of the latter. He tended to gloss over his youthful sympathy for the freedom struggle; he abandoned that kind of advanced patriotism once the 1950s IRA campaign had displayed its full futility and foolishness. As a younger man, he seems to have been a practising Catholic, while later he became an almost rabid denouncer of the evils of the Church of Rome, claiming that Ulster Unionism was the last outpost in Ireland of Renaissance or Enlightenment thought in an Ireland under the shadow of the Catholic Church.
Horgan's account of the Mother and Child crisis of 1951 makes it evident that Browne was not a very good politician, picking rows with people who should have been his allies and friends, and displaying the same kind of intolerance toward others as the Catholic powers-that-were displayed toward people like him. He also developed an antipathy toward Sean MacBride, his party leader in Clann na Poblachta, and seems to have resolved early on in the tenure of the first Inter-Party government to wreck both the government and his own party. James Deeny, Chief Medical Officer of the state, a brilliant epidemiologist and inventor of the nuts-and-bolts detail of the anti-TB campaign, eventually found him impossible to work with. Despite everything, Deeny, like many others, retained a fondness for this tortured man.
Browne's importance in Irish political development lies in his unerring ability to detect the core of mercilessness that lay in many Irish establishment attitudes toward the poor and the vulnerable, a core that even now has scarcely melted away completely. His passion for the protection of the weak was shared by others, but he could not ally with them. His political career was technically a failure, but in actuality it was a success; others finished what he, Deeny and many other almost forgotten people began.
Tom Garvin is Professor of Politics at University College Dublin. His books include 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (1996) and Mythical Thinking in Political Life (2000).