A recent letter I received from Mrs Phyllis Browne highlighted a little-known episode in the career of her late husband, Noel.
The former health minister's lead role in combating tuberculosis in the early 1950s is well-known, but I had not realised that he tried to do the same in far-flung Libya a decade later.
Dr Browne served for a time as the country's chief tuberculosis officer during the reign of King Idris, but it didn't work out and he returned to Ireland. It didn't work out for King Idris either. He was overthrown by Col Gadafy in 1969.
Mrs Browne was writing to correct a reference to Dr Browne in an article I wrote about the 1975 State Papers, which were recently released under the 30-year rule.
A newspaper cutting from 1975 which surfaced in a Military Intelligence file on Dr Browne suggested he was being appointed to a medical post in Libya, but the information was both inaccurate and out-of-date.
The trouble with "spook" files is that they can contain data that are ill-informed and untrue, and sometimes quite damaging, and the Kafkaesque reality is that there is nothing the subjects can do about it since, by definition, they do not even know the file exists.
It saddens me to say that a group of lively and intelligent secondary-school students I spoke to had never heard of Noel Browne. What are they teaching them in the schools?
This man is a hero of modern Ireland who went beyond the political rhetoric to carry out a great project that benefited every man, woman and child in the country.
For the benefit of younger readers, TB was an epidemic comparable with HIV/Aids today. It was accompanied by the same regrettable and unwarranted connotations of shame and disgrace in the minds of the ignorant and uninformed. There was a similar level of official and governmental helplessness until Noel Browne came along and, with a combination of boundless energy and creativity, set about slaying the TB dragon.
Browne should be remembered and revered in the same way that Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln or John F Kennedy are cherished in the public memory of the United States.
Why isn't he? Why don't we have a statue to Dr Browne in O'Connell Street instead of that silly spire? I am not aware of any Noel Browne summer school, medical scholarship or human rights award, although a hospital wing was named after him in Blanchardstown.
It was my privilege to be one of the last journalists to interview Dr Browne, at his Connemara home in 1996; he died six months later, in his 82nd year. I can still see the tears of compassion and rage in his eyes as he surveyed the deserted houses in that impossibly beautiful landscape and lamented the bloodletting of emigration which drained the west of life for so many decades.
One hears suggestions from time to time that Dr Browne was politically immature, particularly in the context of the "Mother and Child" free medical care controversy and the clash with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
Dr Martin Mansergh, who has himself achieved much in North-South relations, suggested recently that Browne's party leader at the time, Seán MacBride, made a mistake in allowing "someone with no political background" to be appointed Minister for Health. But the record shows Browne achieved incomparably more than thousands of other "safe" men and women who kept their mouths shut and clung to power.
If this be immaturity, let us have more of it.
Where now is the righteous anger that pulsed through the veins of figures like Browne and his close associate Jack McQuillan, not to mention Fergal O'Connor, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, Hilda Tweedy, Matt Merrigan, Fr Michael Sweetman, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Peadar O'Donnell and others from a bygone era, when an outspoken dissident could upset the apple-cart in Irish society?
On a good day, a dissident like Noel Browne could catch the imagination of the entire population. The establishment would marshal its forces to marginalise such individuals. The photograph of a police dog attacking Browne at a demonstration says it all.
If they were still with us, I could imagine Dr Browne and his partners-in-dissent leading the charge against the scandalous exploitation of immigrant labour and the even greater scandal of the drugs epidemic. And perhaps also against the scourge of political correctness, so neatly articulated by Fr Pádraig Mac hAol in this page last Monday where in a cri de coeur about false abuse claims against the clergy he said: "An accusation in today's Ireland is the equivalent of guilt."
Probably the greatest surprise for the likes of Noel Browne would be the manner in which the Catholic Church, formerly a bastion of the establishment, has been marginalised to an extent which, in Browne's day, would have been unimaginable.
They might even find common cause on certain issues. Now there's a thought to have John Charles McQuaid turning in his grave.