Dr. Noel Browne wrote of his love for Connemara

By Tom Gillespie

PART ONE

THE son of a Galway father and a Mayo mother, Dr. Noel Browne was Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951, and was the author of the best-selling book ‘Against The Tide’ - an invaluable contribution to the social and political history of Ireland in the 20th century, which was published in 1986.

After the death of his father the Browne family moved to Ballinrobe.

In 2001 Dr. Browne, who was residing in Rossaveal in Connemara, contributed an article to the book ‘Voices of Connemara’ by Bill Long and Raymounde Standún in which one wrote:

We have friends who come to Connemara and tell us that they will never go to Connemara again. They can’t stand the poverty, with the barren fields, and grey stone walls, and the sparseness.

That was what attracted Phyllis and I - that and the sea. I love to watch the sea. I go down there every day and watch her moods. We were interested in the lighthouse there.

Lettermullen is a spectacular place. If you go out there, up to the top of the mountain, you can watch the sea come roaring in. And you can see across to Clare and Galway.

It’s very sad that people deserted the islands in the area, and there are so many houses left there.

We look at Ireland as it should have been, with 14 million people. And then we look at all those empty houses around us here. And we conjure up a picture of how it was. But they had to leave because the conditions weren’t very good. They were probably offered better land. There was a lot of snobbery here too. We met a man and woman one day and she said, ‘I’m a Mac an Rí! He’s only an old Crawford!’

There was a good scheme at one stage by Dev, where people went to Rathcairn, Co. Meath, from around here. But this lady came back, because part of her family grew up here - the Mac an Rí and the Currens. She’s a lovely lady. And they kept the Irish and they intermarried, like the Jews.

The Flahertys all had beautiful hands. They could do anything. The father was a fiodóir (weaver) and a tilliúir (tailor). They would have been great craftsmen. And that brings you back to Rathcairn, where they pushed the land on you. And I was saying that to Mrs. Crawford, and she replied, ‘Oh, they wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t leave here.’

We started making films 40 years ago, on Medical Education, with Pat Butler. Now, there’s this awful antipathy to the cooperative movement. They could do with doing a cost analysis here, because there are five tractors on this one bohereen and they could do with a cooperative movement. And the people here should be educated to see this. They could get so much more out of life, like Connemara West. Connemara West is full of classes and lectures and furniture shops.

You can only grow cattle here, but you can’t fatten them. Frank Aiken came here and organised the putting up of glasshouses, and they grew lovely tomatoes.

The glasshouses blew down in gales and, instead of erecting them again - like they do in Jamaica, after hurricanes - they lost interest in them. They other thing was they had no heat.

But Aiken was ahead of his time. And that’s what they should have done in Connemara.

They should have done the same with the language. They should have nurtured the language and grown out from here instead of the Breac-Ghaeltacht. The people here were all so precious, because they all spoke the Irish language. They didn’t treat it as a special thing, in a special place.

That’s changed now, to some extent, with the RTCs, and they are giving those who stayed a living.

But the old cooperative of Connemara has gone. They now have tunnel vision, with a vengeance. The neighbourliness has gone. They're living in the city now and building there.

It’s an ageing society now. You see the children doing well in education and then they have nothing to offer them.

I used to tell them - the Government - to give the money on an uneconomic holding. And they didn’t face the fact. And I don’t understand why they didn’t take more people out of Connemara, like they did with Rathcairn.

Or go to Connemara and teach them intensive farming, because the people here are very versatile, they’ll do anything.

And instead of that they threw them on the dole. Indeed they bred them on the dole.

When I was a minister I had great interest in Connemara. And I remember Mickey Joe Costelloe. He started the Sugar Company. He was a truly great man in his time.

I asked him to come down to Connemara and see what he could do. And we had different ideas - like growing food on the grass and cutaway bog. But we couldn’t get anyone interested, because they were all on the dole. And then Mickey Joe lost his temper with them and left.

The whole ‘freedom’ experience has been catastrophic. We used to send our people with a one-way ticket to America and they got a job and stayed there.

Connemara was ruined because of that. They had this idea that it didn’t matter. You gave them the dole or sent them away and that was that. But now things are different, and better, with RTCs. They’ve created a new kind of youngster and there will be changes. We’re getting quite different boys now, like the McDonaghs. They’re never going to work the land again, like their father’s did.