Noël Browne

His mother Mary Therese (née Cooney) was born in 1885 in Hollymount, County Mayo; a plaque has been erected there in her memory.

His father Joseph Brown, an RIC sergeant, later worked as an inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and, partly as a result of this work, all of the Browne family became infected with tuberculosis.

Noël Christopher Browne (20 December 1915 – 21 May 1997) was an Irish politician who served as Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951 and Leader of the National Progressive Democrats from 1958 to 1963.

Both parents died of the disease during the 1920s; his father was the first to die, leaving only £100 behind to support his wife and seven children.

Fearing that if she and the children remained in Ireland that they would be forced into a workhouse, Mary (already by this point dying of TB) sold every possession the Brownes had and took the family to London, England.

With two days of their arrival, Mary was dead, later buried in a pauper's grave.

Of her seven children, six contracted tuberculosis.

Noël was only one of two Browne children to survive into adulthood after those bouts with TB. The only sibling who survived with him was his brother Jody, who developed both a hunchback and a cleft palate.

Because of Jody's conditions, Noël described Jody as "completely unwanted" by society, which led his sister to commit Jody to a workhouse.

There, Jody later died on an operating table when, in Noël's own words, a doctor performed "experimental" plastic surgery on Jody.

Jody too was buried in a pauper's grave.

In 1929, he was admitted free of charge to St Anthony's, a preparatory school in Eastbourne.

He then won a scholarship to Beaumont College, the Jesuit public school near Old Windsor, Berkshire, where he befriended Neville Chance, a wealthy boy from Dublin.

Neville's father, the eminent surgeon Arthur Chance (son of surgeon Sir Arthur Chance), subsequently paid Browne's way through medical school at Trinity College Dublin.

In 1940, while still a student, Browne suffered a serious relapse of tuberculosis.

His treatment at a sanatorium in Midhurst, Sussex, was paid for by the Chance family.

He recovered, passed his medical exams in 1942, and started his career as a medical intern at Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin, where he worked under Bethel Solomons He subsequently worked in numerous sanatoria throughout Ireland and England, witnessing the ravages of the disease.

He soon concluded that politics was the only way in which he could make an attack on the scourge of tuberculosis.

The poverty and tragedy that had shaped Browne's childhood deeply affected him.

He considered both his survival and his level of education a complete fluke, a stroke of random chance that saved him when he was seemingly destined to die unknown and in poverty like the rest of his family.

Browne found this completely distasteful and was moved to enter politics as a means to ensure no one else would suffer the same fate that had befallen his family.

A White paper on proposed healthcare reforms had been prepared by the previous government and resulted in the 1947 Health Act.

He served as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1948 to 1954, 1957 to 1973 and 1977 to 1982.

Browne joined the new Irish republican party Clann na Poblachta and was elected to Dáil Éireann for the Dublin South-East constituency at the 1948 general election.

To the surprise of many, party leader Seán MacBride chose Browne to be one of the party's two ministers in the new government.

Browne became one of the few TDs appointed a Minister on their first day in Dáil Éireann, when he was appointed Minister for Health.

In February 1948, Browne became Minister for Health and started the reforms advocated by the Paper and introduced by the Act.

The health reforms coincided with the development of a new vaccine and of new drugs (e.g. BCG and penicillin) that helped to treat a previously untreatable group of medical conditions.

Browne introduced mass free screening for tuberculosis sufferers and launched a huge construction programme to build new hospitals and sanitoria, financed by the income and accumulated investments from the Health Department-controlled Hospital Sweeps funds.

This, along with the introduction of Streptomycin, helped dramatically reduce the incidence of tuberculosis in Ireland.

As Minister for Health Browne came into conflict with the bishops of the Catholic Church and the medical profession over the Mother and Child Scheme.

However, his attempt to implement the Mother and Child Scheme in effect brought down the First Inter-Party Government of Taoiseach John A. Costello in 1951 and remains one of the greatest political controversies in modern Irish political history.

Browne was a well-known, but at times highly controversial, public representative and managed to be a TD for five political parties (two of which he co-founded), as well as an independent TD. These were Clann na Poblachta (resigned), Fianna Fáil (expelled), National Progressive Democrats (co-founder), Labour Party (resigned) and the Socialist Labour Party (co-founder).

Browne is widely acknowledged to have had a propensity for grudges and feuds.

However, he is also widely credited as being a progressive force in Ireland who advocated against corporal punishment and apartheid while supporting contraceptives, abortion and the LGBT community many decades before those positions became mainstream.

Noël Browne was born at Bath Street in Waterford, but grew up in the Bogside area of Derry.

The Browne family also lived in Athlone and Ballinrobe for a period of time.

He was a Senator for the Dublin University constituency from 1973 to 1977.

He holds the distinction of being one of only seven TDs to be appointed to the cabinet on the start of their first term in the Dáil.

As Minister for Health, Browne is credited with waging a successful total war on Tuberculosis.