Noël Christopher Browne (20 December 1915 – 21 May 1997) was an Irish medical doctor and politician who served as Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951 and Leader of the National Progressive Democrats from 1958 to 1963. He was a TD over four periods between 1948 and 1982, and held a Seanad seat for the Dublin University constituency from 1973 to 1977.
Having grown up in poverty, he qualified as a medical doctor in the 1940s. He entered politics to bring attention to tuberculosis, which had killed both his parents and most of his siblings. On his first day in Dáil Éireann in 1948, he was appointed Minister for Health. Browne is credited with waging a successful total war on tuberculosis, but his attempt to implement the Mother and Child Scheme led to his resignation from the government in 1951 and remains a highly controversial episode in Irish political history.
Browne was an outspoken and high-profile figure over more than three decades in the Oireachtas, representing five political parties, founding two, serving in both houses and losing his seat twice. During his time in politics he continued to work as a medical doctor, first in sanatoria and later as a psychiatrist.
Despite having a propensity for feuding and umbrage-taking, Browne is credited as having been a progressive force in Irish public life. He opposed corporal punishment and Apartheid in South Africa, and his advocacy of secularism, abortion rights and LGBT equality preceded these views becoming mainstream in Ireland.
Early life
Noël Browne was born on 20 December 1915 at Bath Street in Waterford city. He was the fourth of eight children. His mother, Mary Therese Cooney, was from Hollymount, County Mayo, and his father, Joseph Browne, was an RIC sergeant from Loughrea, County Galway, who left the force in 1918 after an indifferent career. In his memoir, Browne recalls returning to the street of his birth as an adult without realising he was there. Only his wife Phyllis recognised it, but, observing its squalor, decided not to bring up his personal connection so as not to upset him.
As a young child, Browne moved to the Bogside in Derry city, where his father worked at a shirt factory to supplement his police pension. During his time in Derry, Browne developed persistent deafness in one ear as a result of a poorly treated bout of measles. The family then moved to Athlone, County Westmeath, where Browne's father took up work as an inspector with the Royal Society for the Protection of Children, a job which earned a significantly greater income.
Both of Browne's parents developed tuberculosis, probably due to squalid living conditions in Derry and his father's long hours of work. The disease devastated his family. Browne's father died from it in 1927, forcing the rest of the family to vacate his employer-owned home in Athlone. After a period with his mother's family in Mayo, they moved to Lambeth in London, because his dying mother feared her children would be placed in industrial schools if they stayed in Ireland. In London, Browne's mother died on 18 June 1929 from the disease. His brother Jody died from TB the following year.
The Browne family lacked a permanent home in England, and often returned to Mayo. Eventually, thanks to the efforts of his sister Eileen, the siblings moved to Worthing in West Sussex. Eileen found work at a holiday home whose owner's sister happened to be the co-proprietor of St. Anthony's, an exclusive Catholic preparatory school in Eastbourne. As a result, Browne was able to gain admission there free of charge.
From there, he won a scholarship to Beaumont College, the Jesuit public school in Berkshire. He also befriended Neville Chance, a wealthy boy, the son of a Dublin surgeon. This led to Browne being taken under the wing of the Chance family, who paid for his university education at Trinity College Dublin. At the Dublin University Boat Club, he met sixteen-year-old Phyllis Harrison, a Church of Ireland girl from Cabra, and they began a relationship. Browne completed his medical degree in 1940. He was regarded by contemporaries as an average student and someone with little respect for authority.
Before he graduated, however, he suffered a serious relapse of his tuberculosis. After a spell at Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin, the Chance family paid for him to be hospitalised at a sanatorium in England for two years.
Medical career and entry into politics
During the early 1940s, Browne took up medical internships at sanatoriums in Britain and Ireland, later saying his decision to conduct medical work in England was motivated by a desire to be part of the fight against fascism. In early 1944, he married Phyllis Harrison in a Catholic ceremony at Uxbridge in Middlesex. In 1946, the antipathy of figures connected to the Irish Medical Association to Beveridge-style reforms proposed by Fianna Fáil's Conn Ward contributed to his departure from politics.
Clann na Poblachta won two by-elections in 1947, leading many to believe the party was en route to win the next general election and motivating Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to call an early election with a view to halting the new party's growth. While still serving as Assistant Hospital Superintendent at Newcastle, and now a father of two, Browne was selected as Clann na Poblachta candidate in Dublin South-East, a constituency which included senior politicians Seán MacEntee and John A. Costello. The mid-winter campaign was rancorous, featuring the use of Red Scare tactics by the Fianna Fáil government, and generated an unusually high level of international interest due to the possibility of a de Valera defeat.
Clann na Poblachta won only ten seats at the election, but, amid heavy losses for Fianna Fáil in Dublin, Browne won the last of the three seats in Dublin South-East, behind Costello and MacEntee.
Minister for Health
Fianna Fáil had fallen well short of a majority at the election, and after sixteen years of uninterrupted rule, an unlikely coalition replaced them, comprising all five other parties: Fine Gael, the Labour Party, National Labour, Clann na Talmhan and Clann na Poblachta. It was Ireland's first coalition government. Due to his anti-tuberculosis campaigning, Browne was appointed Minister for Health on his first day in the Dáil. He was thirty-two years old.
Browne was now responsible for implementing the Health Act which had been passed by the previous government in 1947. As health minister, he controlled the funds generated by the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake, comprising just over £10 million in 1948, and set about spending them on the eradication of TB. Browne quickly became a figure of national prominence. He was acutely aware that he could die young from tuberculosis and acted with energy and vigour.
Healthcare in Ireland remained highly stratified in this period, between dispensaries caring for the very poor, and hospitals, dominated by consultants, which were controlled by voluntary bodies linked to the Catholic Church. Doctors and hospitals had enormous power and were highly suspicious of centralised state control. There were also tensions between the medical establishment, many with private educations and higher degrees, and the civil servants at the Department of Health, whom they tended to look down upon.
As health minister, Browne dramatically expanded the provision of hospitals and sanatoriums, created the National Blood Transfusion Association, and introduced free X-ray testing for TB. Along with the introduction of a new antibiotic, streptomycin, these measures contributed to a dramatic decline in TB fatality in Ireland. 1955 was the first year since the state was founded in which fewer than a thousand people died from the disease, and by 1960, the death rate for TB had fallen by more than eighty per cent from its peak.
Browne was an admirer of Britain's National Health Service and wished to expand access to healthcare in Ireland further. In 1950, he announced plans for a programme known as the Mother and Child Scheme, which would provide free state-funded healthcare to all mothers and children under the age of sixteen, with no means test. Doctors objected to the absence of a means test, as they were reliant on patient fees for their income. The hierarchy also expressed concern that doctors trained in non-Catholic institutions would provide gynaecological care without conforming to Catholic principles. In April 1951, Seán MacBride asked for Browne's resignation as Minister for Health. In his resignation speech to the Dáil, Browne said:
<blockquote>I had been led to believe that my insistence on the exclusion of a means test had the full support of my colleagues in the Government. I now know that it had not. Furthermore, the Hierarchy has informed the Government that they must regard the mother and child scheme proposed by me as opposed to Catholic social teaching. This decision I, as a Catholic, immediately accepted without hesitation.</blockquote>
He also complained that the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, had written a letter to the Bishop of Ferns describing the scheme as one "advocated by the Minister for Health", implying that the government as a whole did not support it. After efforts by he and Michael ffrench-O'Carroll to form a new party were unsuccessful, Browne joined Fianna Fáil in October 1953. He was now a government backbencher, but he lost his seat at the 1954 election, largely due to the unpopularity of his running mate, Seán MacEntee, who had introduced a highly contentious Budget as Minister for Finance in 1952. At the election, he re-gained his Dáil seat in Dublin South-East as an independent.
In 1958, Browne and Jack McQuillan founded the National Progressive Democrats, a secular, left-wing party comprising many former members of Clann na Poblachta. The party was highly active in Dáil debates – to the point that the main opposition parties in the early 1960s, Fine Gael and Labour, changed the standing orders to thwart them – but failed to make electoral inroads. but in 1963, he and McQuillan joined the Labour Party and disbanded their party. Browne's decision to join Labour was motivated by a bout of ill-health, concerns that the success of TB eradication would cost him his day job, and the recent retirement of a political nemesis in the party, William Norton.
Again out of public office, he became a leading figure on the Labour Party's nascent young left. Browne was elected Vice President of the Labour Party in 1967. Following the death of James Everett, Browne sought the Labour nomination to contest a by-election in Wicklow, the area in which he lived, but was defeated by Liam Kavanagh. Browne became a figurehead for those within the party who were opposed to coalition unless Labour was the senior partner. Browne became a vocal opponent of Apartheid in South Africa: in 1970, he was among those who protested outside Thomond Park in Limerick and Lansdowne Road in Dublin when Ireland played the South African rugby team. Browne publicly called for a "progressively expanding boycott on the importation of South African produce, as advocated by the ANC".
In the lead-up to the 1969 general election, Labour offered a radically left-wing manifesto including nationalisation of banks and the offer of a wide range of free public services. A number of high-profile figures had joined the party as election candidates, including Justin Keating, David Thornley and Conor Cruise O'Brien. Browne re-gained his seat in Dublin South-East, though the expected national breakthrough did not materialise, and Fianna Fáil won an overall majority. Later that year, Browne suffered a minor heart attack, which contributed to his disillusionment with his work in mental health. He had spent years working in Ballymun, and believed government neglect was contributing to a crisis he could not solve through medical expertise alone. In 1970, he moved back to the former Newcastle Sanatorium, now a psychiatric facility, to work as a psychiatrist.
The outbreak of the Troubles drastically shifted the internal politics of the Labour Party. The party leader, Brendan Corish, believed the poor 1969 election performance, the growing mayhem in Northern Ireland and the Arms Crisis justified reversing the party's anti-coalition stance. This turned Browne into an implacable opponent of Corish's leadership. In 1971, Browne issued a speech attacking clerical celibacy which attracted opposition even from Labour's liberal wing. Corish distanced himself from the remarks, but in response Browne frequently brought up a previous statement Corish had made that he was "a Catholic first, an Irishman second and a socialist third". Browne said he viewed Salvador Allende as a model for introducing socialism by parliamentary means.
At the 1973 general election, Browne refused to sign the National Coalition's election pledges, which barred him from standing as a Labour candidate. Ruairi Quinn stood for Labour in Dublin South-East. With this, Browne believed his parliamentary career was at an end.
Seanad Éireann and Socialist Labour
Following the 1973 general election, Browne was persuaded by David Thornley and others to stand in the Dublin University Seanad constituency. He was nominated by, among others, John Armstrong, the Anglican Bishop of Cashel and Waterford. He was elected comfortably, finishing in second place on first preferences behind Mary Robinson. Though still formally a member of the Labour Party, he was denied access to meetings of the parliamentary party. This meant that Browne could speak at party events – at which he was intensely critical of the coalition government – but was not subject to a party whip in the Seanad, an arrangement which turned out to suit him.
In the Seanad, Browne spoke on a wide range of issues, mostly relating to the influence of the Catholic Church, including contraception and divorce. In 1976, he visited Amherst, Massachusetts for a conference on the conflict in Northern Ireland. In an article he wrote on his return, he praised Seamus Costello, the leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and the founder of the Irish National Liberation Army. This was a major shift for a figure previously known for his hostility to physical-force Republicanism and his association of it with militant Catholicism.
Browne decided to stand for the Dáil at the 1977 general election in Dublin Artane, on the city's northside, but was again denied permission to be a Labour candidate. He stood as an independent and was elected comfortably, outpolling the official Labour candidate by two-to-one. Later in 1977, his membership of Labour was terminated by the party, and, aged sixty-one, he decided to retire from medicine. He removed himself from the medical register in 1978. In 1979, was one of the few Irish politicians to attend the opening of the Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin's first full-time LGBT community space.
Browne and his allies, including Matt Merrigan, formed the Socialist Labour Party in October 1977. He was its sole TD, though Browne did not wish to be its leader and the party permitted divisions over a number of policy issues, including Northern Ireland. At the 1981 general election, he was re-elected as a TD in the Dublin North-Central constituency. He voted for the January 1982 Budget introduced by John Bruton which proposed to add VAT to children's shoes. The Budget was defeated in the Dáil, which precipitated the collapse of Garret FitzGerald's coalition government. Browne decided to retire from the Dáil at the election that followed. The book took four years to write, and Browne came into conflict with editors regularly. A friend, the Labour TD Michael D. Higgins, played a significant role in encouraging Browne to complete the project. Shortly after the book was published, Browne visited the Soviet Union for the first time. Spring was determined to move quickly and got the Parliamentary Labour Party to endorse a proposal of having Robinson for consideration at its meeting on April 4. 22 days later, Browne's candidacy was defeated at a joint meeting of the PLP and Labour's Administrative Council on a reported margin of "at least 4:1." When Spring informed Browne by telephone that the party's Administrative Council had chosen Robinson over him, Browne hung up the telephone. Browne endorsed Austin Currie at the election.
Browne was highly critical of Mary Robinson after her election as president, calling the presidency an "impotent, titular post" and reacting to Robinson placing a symbolic lamp in the window of her official residence upon election (as a reminder of all of those forced to leave Ireland to seek work) in a letter to family by stating, "May one grieving Irish family, among those bidding farewell and those left behind, tell our roving president her fatuous, low-watt, low-powered, cheapest available, warmly welcoming electrical candle brought no comfort to our diaspora and could now, permanently, be switched off."
Browne died at Baile na hAbhann, County Galway on 21 May 1997, aged 81.
Legacy
Few figures in 20th-century Ireland were as controversial as Noël Browne. On his death in 1997, The Independent said: "Admirers say his freshness to politics helped him break new ground. But fellow ministers reportedly found him petulant, unwilling to listen, and convinced he was always right. There was probably some truth in both."
Labour strategist Fergus Finlay said Browne had developed into a "bad tempered and curmudgeonly old man". Historian and political scientist Maurice Manning wrote that Browne "had the capacity to inspire fierce loyalty, but many of those who worked with and against him over the years found him difficult, self-centred, unwilling to accept the good faith of his opponents and often profoundly unfair in his intolerance of those who disagreed with him".
Nell McCafferty attended his funeral, writing for the Sunday Tribune:
<blockquote>Had there been more people around, we might have had a good row, accused each other of nefarious activities, but the fretful silence by the graveside of a political prince was suddenly, dauntingly appropriate. Noel Browne was gone with the soft wind that blew memories of him all over the land. The evening tide came in for him, at six minutes to seven, shortly after we had gone away.</blockquote>
In a 2010 RTÉ public poll, he finished in the top ten of Ireland's Greatest. In 2021, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, also a medical doctor, gave a lecture on Browne to students of Trinity College Dublin, in which he summarised Browne's career. Varadkar noted Browne's cantankerous reputation but generally praised Browne, stating that Varadkar always "admired his idealism, his passion, and his determination to stand up for the causes and the people he believed in".