Noel Browne

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Works
Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1986, rep. 2007), 280pp.; John Horgan, Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2009), 354pp.

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Criticism
Phyllis Browne, Thanks for the Tea, Mrs. Browne: My Life with Noel (Dublin: New Island Press 1998), 240pp. [‘controversial memoirs’]; John Horgan, Noel Browne: A Passionate Outsider (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2009), 352pp. See also Eithne MacDermott, Clann na Poblachta (Cork UP 1998); and Ruth Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland 1900-1970 (Dublin: IPA 1987) [contesting his account in Against the Tide].

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Quotations
Against the Tide (1986): [After the death of mother and father] ‘We children were then left homeless and penniless, as were and are so many unwanted children of primitive peasant societies such as ours was.’ [3]; contains a critique of Pearse’s ‘rich red blood which so enhances the soul’; account of ambush involving General Sean MacEoin, ‘the blacksmith of Ballinalee’ [5]. (Cont.)

Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: ‘Much later in a diary kept by Peadar Cowan, an officer in the Free State Army in Custume Barracks [Athlone], I read of the blindingly whimsical system whereby the victims [of State reprisals for the killing of Deputy Sean Hales] were chosen for death, it was a simple process of taking a group of prisoners from each county. [...] Since these men had all been in custody at the time of the shooting of Hales and were known to be innocent of the assassination for which the reprisals were being carried out, their killing was indefensible. The most stunning experience for me was to read how Peadar, a parliamentary colleague of mine in later life, recounted the incident of the mass executions without showing any sense of horror, shock, guilt or concern whatever for the whole process or his own part in it. Yet Peadar was what is known in Ireland as ‘a devoutly religious man.”’ [7].

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: ‘I went to school, to the local Christian Brothers. They certainly taught us with great diligence, and with some effect, but for the most part they were enthusiastic religious zealots, whose sole purpose was to win young Irish boys and girls to Roman Catholicism in a united Ireland. They did not see any contradiction in fighting fiercely and winning partial sovereignty from the English while still proclaiming total subservience on all issues of serious social and political importance to a different faraway ruler in Rome. / These deeply religious men and women, using the term “religious” in its loosest sense, had represented a remarkable phenomenon during the nineteenth century in Ireland, giving up their lives to promote a most powerful renaissance of Catholicism while at the same time sending hundreds of their numbers throughout the continents of Africa, Asia, the [29] Americas and elsewhere as missionaries for the Catholic Faith. The general ethos was a powerful sense of angry nationalism and the demand that in all of us there must be inculcated a self-sacrificing patriotism. [...]’

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: [In Ballinarobe] A militant republicanism replaced the bland Free State ambience of Athlone. We knew and admired men “on the run”; unconsciously we braced ourselves for future sacrifice and struggle, probably even prison and death, “for Ireland”s freedom” [...]’ [30.] (Cont.)

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: ‘This driving obsessive hatred for and of the English was systematically inculcated in our consciousness and rationalised for us into an embittered set of convictions. Hatred for Protestants, because their faith was of English origin, became an unpleasant feature of all our lives. [...] The hatred derived not solely from the occupation of our country but, according to the teaching of the Christian Brothers, from the destruction by the English of our Catholic faith. / Our history taught us to mourn, with intent to revenge, the savage torture by pitchcap and the rack of our patriot martyrs.’ [30] (cont.)

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: [On the treatment of children from the Gaelteacht in the Christian Brothers’ Schools] In spite of the fact that here was the true repository of the cherished native language, they were not favoured by our militant nationalist Christian Brothers but treated with contempt as members of a lower order as the British had once treated all of us native Irish. [...] At least one of them appeared to be chosen with little reason for the cruelly unbridled beatings with constituted Christian Brother discipline.’ [31]. ‘Surely there was some private pain which the brother thereby tried to exorcise within himself.’ [32] (Cont.)

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: - on ‘a practising pederast’ [32]: Brown finds himself trapped into sharing a bed with the middle-aged curate who has displayed ‘an affection for young boys.’ [33] (Cont.)

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Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: ‘While my cousin without demur agreed to stay the night with the curate and sleep in his bed, I blankly refused to join them. The night ended for me with a comic opera solution, I agreed that I would sleep in the bed of the priest’s house-keeper. I have distinct memories of some arrangement of a blanket partition between myself and the housekeeper. She need not have worried, even if I had known of the possibilities and wished to avail myself of them. I fell asleep at once, totally exhausted by the struggle to keep away from the curate’s bed.’ [34] (Cont.)

Against the Tide (1986) - cont.: ‘Neither in Athlone nor in Ballinrobe were we at any time visited by any public official or person of substance other than the rent collector. No member of a religious order, nun, priest, or brother, came near the house to see if we needed help. Life in Ireland then was completely unconcerned with and uncaring for the poor.’ [35]

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L & H: ‘Vincent Browne is somewhat more circumspect “Several of those now fully registered as astounding national idiots ‘graced’ the L&H in the mid-1960s,” he writes. They managed to say nothing at all, with spectacular panache, he says. In 1961, the L&H had to hold its AGM in the Shelbourne Hotel, because UCD had suspended the society.’ (See Hugh Oram, ‘L&H: Behemoth among UCD Societies’ [review article of The Literary & Historical Society 1955-2005], in UCD News, 21 June 2005 [Irish Times Special Report] - available online as pdf.)

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Notes
William Norton was reported as saying at the time of Dr. Browne’s Mother & Child Bill (1947): ‘If the question is raised as one in which the Bishops are to be on one side and the Government on the other side, I say, on behalf of the Government, that issue is not to arise in this country. This Government will not travel down that road ... There will be no flouting of the authority of the Bishops of Catholic social or Catholic moral teaching [&c]’ (Irish Times, quoted in J. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923-1979, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1980, Chaps. 7 & 8; cited in Anthony Alcock, Understanding Ulster, 1994 [q.p.)

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Joining Labour: Brown’s decision to join Labour, with Jack McQuillan, TD, was reported in a column on the front page of The Irish Times on 8 Nov. 1963 (See Irish Times ARchives, rep. in Irish Times, 19 Dec. 2009, Weekend.)

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