Dr. Noel Browne was terrified of ending up in Mayo workhouse

PART 2

By Tom Gillespie

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:

I’m the only Irishman in the Browne family. They all emigrated to America. Una, my sister, emigrated at 12 years of age, by herself. She went on the boat from Galway, when the boats were still leaving from there. She was mad angry, and she wouldn’t look to come back. She had this sense of rejection. There was a lot of that feeling and so people never came home again.

When Una went, an aunt received her on the other side. She became a nurse. But a lot of girls went out and were received by people they didn’t know. They may have been used for prostitution.

Many Irishmen died making the Panama Canal. And they wouldn’t even use slaves for that. We’re past masters at selective amnesia.

In my own life I had the experience of a brother who died in the workhouse. They experimented on him during an operation and he eventually died.

And it, so easily, could have happened on myself. In fact, I very nearly went to Letterfrack. However, incredibly, instead of going to Letterfrack, I went to be educated by the Jesuits in Beaumont, the other extreme.

I can’t forget those experiences. I got my education accidentally. Strangers asked if I would like to be educated.

The workhouse was very much an issue 50 (now over 70) years ago. I was terrified of workhouses. There was a black van that used to go around Ballinrobe and I was terrified of it, because I thought it was designed to bring us to the workhouse.

But, in fact, it was bringing dead bodies to the workhouse.

My mother was, shortly afterwards, buried in a common grave in London. I was about nine when my father died, and my mother died when I was 12. That was the last time I had any family. And so the natural progression would have been to go to the workhouse.

But then, these extraordinary accidents started to happen. These wonderful people came along and offered me an education.

I see Peaitín now - a local lad - and he can make wonderful boats. But, instead of that, he’s full of diesel oil. And I feel he should be an artist of some kind. He should be working with this gifted hands. And that’s a great loss to society.

The arts are another thing. There’s very little here. In Galway we have nothing. And Dublin isn’t that great.

In Galway there’s no College of Art. And it’s a very wealthy city, with new shopping complexes opening every other week.

And there’s no College of Music. They had the option to include music as a course in the university since the ‘60s, but they haven’t done it.

There’s no opera, ballet, symphony music, or chamber music. There’s no serious theatre. There’s one in a garage. And there are wonderful young people trying to be artists, but they get no assistance at all.

My theory is that from the Norman conquest on, right through to the British invasion, we lived at that level that you new find in common Ireland: there was no room in our lives for the aesthetic side of our lives - the arts. We lived to survive.

That was disastrous and we never developed an artistic ethos in our society. All the great music and art in Ireland stopped dead in the 12th century and never re-emerged. And the result is we are still people of the 11th century.

The Irish people, as such, have little to no connection with the people who inhabited the island after the 12th century. And we lost the opportunity to develop our music. It was not as developed as folk music in other countries.

And the really big damage the British did to us was to impose a dark age on us for 700 years. And that’s why we have so little to show in our great galleries and museums.

I was paying tribute, recently, to the Connemara people and their likeness to the ordinary Australian people.

I asked Mrs. Mac an Rí what she though of ‘The Requiem’. She said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have included so much poverty!’ But what else could you include in the 17th century. But these people are the original Irish people. I’m Anglo-Norman and my children have about six different nationalities running through them.

But the original Irish people are like the Aztecs. So I liken them to the Aztecs and the Aborigines.

When we came here first the big difference to Phyllis and myself was when we saw a pram gaping down the road. That was revolutionary.

When we came here first the boys were sent to Agricultural College in Athenry. And they threw them out. They said, ‘If you haven’t got 30 acres don’t be bothering us.’ They weren’t prepared to develop the horticultural side of Connemara.

They treated it as if it was County Meath or County Kildare and they tried to rear cattle there.

Anyway, all these boys are technicians now. They’re skilled craftsmen - electricians, plasters and bricklayers. That has upgraded the living standards. And they all have these dreadfully marvellous eight-bedroomed houses. And they’re brilliantly resourceful.

That has been a very dramatic transition. But that means that Connemara has gone in the way that we knew it.

If you want to get the real Connemara you have to go back to the past, before the changes. They’re now doing intensive farming. The whole sort of cooperative nature of the Connemara home, where Mamó was the head of the house, and Mamó would decide who repeated, who gardened and so on, has all gone.

Concluded.