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. In total, all but one of Browne's siblings died from the disease, and Browne himself contracted it five times.
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. At Beaumont, he played cricket and rugby, and deliberately failed the mandatory military training examinations twelve times. 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.
Browne moved to Dublin to study medicine in 1934. His time at Trinity was relatively carefree, and included boating trips to Nazi Germany and France on the eve of the Second World War. He drove a sports car and lived in a house on Merrion Square. 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. Experimental procedures he underwent during this period saved his life, but left him with only one functioning lung.
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. Two years later, he qualified as a medical doctor.
In late 1944, he moved back to Ireland to work at the Royal National Hospital for Consumption in Newcastle, County Wicklow. There, he befriended a TB patient and Irish Times journalist, Harry Kennedy. He and Kennedy spoke extensively about politics, society and ideas, and Browne credits Kennedy with helping form his political philosophy. Before his death from TB, Kennedy introduced Browne to Noel Hartnett, a barrister and political activist who had just left Fianna Fáil and was in the process of forming a new left-wing Republican party with his friend and mentor Seán MacBride.
Browne joined the party, Clann na Poblachta, with ambitions to make tuberculosis a national political issue. At this time, Ireland did not have a full-time Minister for Health, and efforts to combat failings in the health system were stymied by the Irish Red Cross, which was under the control of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. 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. Browne's youth and inexperience, however, made him a target for attacks from the Fianna Fáil opposition, and his status as a Catholic who had attended Trinity College made him an object of suspicion to Archbishop McQuaid.
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 issue also became a battleground for a showdown between church and state. The Catholic hierarchy had forced the previous Fianna Fáil government to climb down on plans for free healthcare for mothers and children. It resumed its campaign against "socialised medicine", this time targeting Browne. The Bishop of Galway, Michael Browne, said the scheme was "based on the socialistic principle that children belonged to the State...and reminded one of the claims put forward by Hitler and Stalin". The hierarchy also expressed concern that doctors trained in non-Catholic institutions would provide gynaecological care without conforming to Catholic principles.
Months of attempted mediation between the government and the hierarchy proved fruitless. Perceived as aloof by his cabinet colleagues, Browne became politically isolated.Gabriel Kelly et al. (eds), Irish Social Policy in Context (UCD Press, 1999) p. 29. In April 1951, Seán MacBride asked for Browne's resignation as Minister for Health. In his resignation speech to the Dáil, Browne said:
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.