In 1934 a group of Protestant workers from the Shankill Road decided to dip a toe into the republican puddle. A lorryload of them travelled down to take part in the republican rally at Bodenstown in memory of Wolfe Tone, whose ideal it was to reconcile Protestant, Catholic and dissenter. At this stage there were two distinct elements within the republican movement. One had a rather confessional Catholic tinge while the other veered towards progressive socialist ideas. MacBride belonged to the Catholic wing and was, in effect, one of its principal leaders. When the Protestant workers arrived at Bodenstown, they were ambushed by the Southern republicans, beaten up and expelled from the graveyard. While I have discovered no written authorisation from MacBride for this, there is little doubt that it could not have happened without his consent.

In 1936 Sean MacBride became Chief of Staff of the IRA following the arrest of Moss Twomey. However, the following year he was got rid of and someone regarded as more representative of the Irish people, Sean Russell, later to become an active collaborator with the Nazis, was installed. At this point, MacBride claimed to have accepted the 1937 Constitution and severed his official connection with the IRA.

In 1946 Sean MacBride once more spearheaded a movement to set up a new party, this time to be called Clann na Poblachta. The party’s programme included the reunification of Ireland and a vigorous economic and social agenda. In the 1947 general election

Clann na Poblachta won ten seats and joined a coalition government with Fine Gael, Labour and Clann na Talmhan.

MacBride’s republicanism did not fade with his inclusion in the cabinet.
After he got himself made Minister for External Affairs, one of his main objectives was to sever the link with his mother’s native country – England. MacBride was, in fact, prepared to remain within the Commonwealth, and indeed to join NATO, but the price of this was the reunification of the country. Interestingly, Mr De Valera, a wily politician and strategist, was forced into a corner by MacBride’s manoeuvring and was unable to come out with his real position, which was that remaining as an independent republic within the Commonwealth might constitute a bridge with the Northern unionists. The views of Garret FitzGerald on this matter are also of interest:

‘I had been brought up to regard MacBride with deep hostility; a member of the IRA from the Civil War onwards, he had been its Chief of Staff in the mid 30s just after some particularly shocking murders had made a profound impression on me, including one near Ring College when I was in school there. His later conversion to constitutionism had seemed to me ambivalent. My unhappiness was intensified when the Taoiseach announced the Government’s intention to declare a Republic. At that time this clearly meant leaving the Commonwealth, for the evolution of which into a body of sovereign, independent states John Costello as Attorney General, with people like my father, Paddy McGilligan and Kevin O’Higgins, had worked so successfully in the years before 1932.’

The leader of the British Liberal Party declared that, while it would seem that the purpose of Éire in deciding to become an independent republic was to secure the reunion of Ireland, they had now taken the one step most calculated to defeat that purpose.

Moreover, two days after the declaration of the Irish Republic and the repeal of the External Relations Act, India secured the status of a republic but has remained to this day within the Commonwealth. However, despite whatever doubts one may have about the wisdom of this action, there can be no doubting MacBride’s intellectual brilliance in the debate between himself and Mr De Valera in which he forensically dissected De Valera’s ambivalence.

The most imaginative appointment of this administration was that of a young, intensely motivated doctor, Noel Browne, to the Department of Health. Noel Browne’s family had been devastated by tuberculosis and he made it his principal aim to eradicate this scourge from Irish life.

Dealing with the appointment of Browne, MacBride employed a classic smear tactic, writing that Browne was ‘a young man who was or had come from Trinity College and that kind of conservative, Unionist background.
I don’t think that at that time I knew that he was the son of an RIC man.’

This is classic MacBride, caricaturing Noel Browne, a man from an impoverished TB-ridden peasant family in the West of Ireland, as a member of the Trinity establishment with a conservative unionist background. Moreover, far from being an RIC man, Browne’s father was in fact an RSPCA inspector who lost his job when he contracted TB.

In his posthumous memoir, Sean MacBride does everything to claim credit for the fight against TB while simultaneously disassociating himself from responsibility for the Mother and Child débâcle which was to follow and to smear Noel Browne. May I say, from twenty years’ practical knowledge of politics in this country, every department in this state is stuffed with good ideas, plans, programmes and proposed legislation which never come to fruition. Whatever else can be said, it is incontrovertibly true that Noel Browne acted upon the proposals and by his individual energy secured their implementation.

Browne then moved on to the provision of maternal services by the state in the notorious Mother and Child Scheme. Once again, in his memoirs MacBride seeks to undermine Noel Browne’s responsibility for this, on the grounds that a tentative proposal of this nature already existed in the department. Indeed it did. A watered-down version of such a scheme had been timidly mooted by Mr De Valera but he immediately beat a strategic retreat at the mere suggestion of a belt from an ecclesiastical crozier. Noel Browne rapidly reinstated a fuller version of this with provision for free health care for mothers and their children up to the age of sixteen. This caused some disquiet among the fat cats of the medical profession but most particularly evoked a negative response from within the Roman Catholic hierarchy who saw here a symptom of creeping communism. They stated that ‘The right to provide for the health of children belongs to parents and not to the State.’
This theoretical position completely ignored the parlous state of many families in the Ireland of the 1940s.

However the opposition of the Church was enough to provoke a major crisis. The Taoiseach, John A. Costello, said, ‘I am an Irish man second: I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the Hierarchy and the Church to which I belong.’ During the actual Dáil debate he said, ‘I, as a Catholic, obey my Church authorities and will continue to do so.’

In the middle of this crisis, MacBride and Browne met for dinner in the Russell Hotel in November 1950 at MacBride’s suggestion. MacBride has left an account of this in which he claims that Noel Browne declared his intention of destroying Clann na Poblachta, bringing down the government, humiliating MacBride and, if possible, replacing him as leader. There were no witnesses to this exchange, although MacBride did make a contemporaneous note. I have read this note. I knew both Sean MacBride and Noel Browne. I am proud to have been able to call Noel Browne a friend of mine

for nearly thirty years. He was a man of honour, integrity and compassion. I also knew Sean MacBride, although not terribly well. In my dealings with him, I found him narrow, Machiavellian, cunning and evasive. I do not accept MacBride’s version of events as in any sense likely to reflect the truth.

At the reconvened cabinet meeting, Noel Browne asked each member in turn for support. Not one person was prepared to challenge the right of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to dictate policy to the government of Ireland.
A day or two later, Sean MacBride precipitated the dismissal of Noel Browne from government. In his memoirs, MacBride claims that Noel Browne had said to him on a number of occasions prior to this, ‘If I can really pick a row with the Irish Hierarchy I will be made.’ I give this no credence whatever. It is difficult to comprehend how MacBride imagined this ecclesiastical kowtowing would assist in his programme for incorporating a million or so uncooperative Protestants into his Workers Republic.

The net result was the collapse of the coalition. By 1957 MacBride, unlike Noel Browne, had become unelectable and withdrew from parliamentary politics while continuing a career at national and international level as a lawyer.

He had already been partly responsible for the European Convention of Human Rights and the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights under the Council of Europe and this is greatly to his credit. It is, however, highly unlikely that MacBride would have welcomed many of the decisions which subsequently emerged from that court, including my own victory on the question of the decriminalisation of homosexual behaviour.

I only knew MacBride in the last ten years of his life. I had been prominent in the struggle for gay liberation since the early 1970s and was one of those responsible for the creation of the International Gay Association. As a result, I was contacted by a

Finnish gay group who were under very considerable surveillance pressure and the threat of physical brutality from the Russian police. They sent to me an appeal that this matter should be brought up at a meeting of international jurists in Geneva where Ireland was to be represented by Sean MacBride. I wrote him a detailed explanatory note and enclosed documentation from the Finnish group requesting that he take an interest in this matter. To my astonishment, the entire parcel was opened, my letter was opened and read and then my letter reinserted in its envelope, the whole thing parcelled up and posted back to me without as much as a single word of acknowledgement. I had not expected such brutal ignorance from a man such as MacBride but I would have done so had I known of his views on homosexual behaviour which he subsequently expressed in an interview in The Crane Bag with Peadar Kirby. When Kirby raised the question of discrimination against gay people, MacBride blithely dismissed it, bracketing homosexuals with heroin addicts, a not entirely flattering companionship.

But there was even worse. I had become passionately concerned at the fate of the great humanitarian and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. He had saved a very large number of Hungarian Jews by going, unarmed, onto the cattle trains taking them to

Auschwitz, braving the armed might of the Gestapo and issuing them with Swedish passports. He was subsequently captured by the Russians and disappeared into the Soviet Gulag. I raised his fate by formal motion at the 1983 general meeting of Amnesty.

MacBride made every effort to quench my initiative and, to my horror, at the 1984 AGM in Hatch Street, I discovered that he had actually succeeded in deleting every reference to Wallenberg from the record. I subsequently insisted on an amendment to the minutes to include a reference to this situation.

Raoul Wallenberg was one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century but, tragically, was never adopted by Amnesty as a prisoner of conscience. Why should MacBride take this attitude? Was it to ingratiate himself with his Soviet friends who had conferred upon
him the Lenin Prize for Peace or was it that he knew, as I was to discover only later, that Raoul Wallenberg was himself homosexual.

Whatever the reason, there was, in my opinion, no excuse. MacBride’s homophobia also led him to complete blindness about the situation in Ireland. He told his /Crane Bag/ interviewer that, although the Irish were naturally intolerant people (which I question), there was no legal discrimination whatever in the republic. Presumably he thought gay people didn’t exist at all, even though I had attempted on numerous occasions to draw his attention to the state of affairs here regarding this oppression.

In conclusion, I have a somewhat quirky grudge against Sean MacBride from the field of Joycean studies. I was friendly with the late Maria Jolas, who published Finnegans Wake in episodic form in Paris in the 1930s. She told me that in the aftermath of the Irish state bringing the body of the poet W.B. Yeats back to Ireland by gunboat after the war, Nora Joyce approached the Irish government to see if they would do something similar for her late husband. The matter went to government and Maria told me that, for some reason, Sean MacBride refused to support it and the matter was spiked. Harriet Weaver, a year or two later, wished to find an appropriate resting place for the manuscript of Finnegans Wake. She wanted to donate it to the National Library in Dublin. However, according to Maria Jolas, when this was broached with Nora Joyce she absolutely refused to countenance such a plan in the light of MacBride’s refusal. Thus one of the most significant manuscripts of the twentieth century was lost forever to Ireland. The outline of this regrettable situation is referred to in Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Joyce but without specific reference to MacBride’s role.

Towards the end of his life, MacBride was given significant honours internationally. He received the Congressional Medal of Honour from America, the Lenin Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize. However, be it noted that among other recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize around that time were those well-known ‘men of peace’ Menachem Begin and Henry Kissinger.

Sean MacBride died in January 1988. He was a complex, talented and somewhat sinister personality. He helped to create the machinery for human-rights legislation in Europe, opposed nuclear armaments and served the United Nations well in Namibia. He
deserves our gratitude for helping to establish Amnesty International but he remains narrow, sectarian and too close for comfort to the armed republican movement. He was a man without self-awareness or a sense of irony. Risteárd Mulcahy summed him up well in a review of his posthumous memoir, saying:

‘MacBride emerges as a man of energy with a wide interest in social, economic and political affairs. However, he also emerges from his own writings as a man of unusual vanity, less than charitable to his opponents, happy in the company of world figures, consistent in seeing himself in a favourable light and without providing the necessary evidence to allow historians to take an impartial view of his contributions to recent Irish history.’