ALTHOUGH he is, happily, still with us, Noel Browne has gone to paradise. What else would you call a stone cottage on the shores of Galway Bay: in front of you, the Aran Islands and, to your right, the spectacular panorama of the Twelve Pins?

But although retired, Browne cannot enjoy the scene without hearing the still, small voice of social conscience. As we survey the patchwork of stone walls between us and the misty mountains, he comments on the "terrible desertion" caused by decades of emigration.

The home of Noel and Phyllis Browne (they have been together 60 years now) stands like a good deed in a world of bungalow blitz. They have bucked the trend, the vile rash of haciendaitis which afflicts this ethereal beauty spot, by restoring and modernising a traditional homestead instead of demolishing or abandoning it. A turf fire crackles on a cradle-type grate and old farm implements hang on the wall. Browne refers to it as a "museum".

Browne himself has been consigned to the shelf as a museum-piece by many politicians and commentators since his retirement from politics in 1983. He last made a splash with his memoirs, Against the Tide in 1986, marvellously well-written and, at times, staggering in their venom.

Born on December 20th, 1915, he might by now be excused for sitting quietly in a glass case to, be gawped and gawked at by tourists and bored schoolchildren, dimly aware that he was once a mover and shaker who eradicated TB caused a great fuss over something called the Mother and Child Scheme and had a "thing" about the Church.

Ah yes, the Mother and Child Scheme. No prizes for guessing that Browne still talks about it. Even today, that tangled imbroglio is hard to summarise. Suffice to say that on one side there was the Church and the medical profession, on the other was ... Noel Browne. The row over his proposal for free ante and post-natal care for mothers and free medical care for children under 16, without a means test, drove a stake through the heart of the first inter party government but not before Browne had released his never-to-be-forgotten X-ray pictures of church-state relations.

With a smile, he recalls how a BBC crew visited Ireland some years back and asked politicians why there was no divorce and why condoms and gays were banned? They were told Noel Browne had raised all those issues "and look what happened to him". So the BBC crew turned up on his door: "We came to find out what happened to you."

So what has happened to Noel Browne? Physically frail, he remains mentally alert. He still watches every move on the political scene and ponders its significance. As a psychiatrist, he is fascinated by motivation: "Phyllis will tell you I'm always wondering why, why, why, why do people do what they do."

The old radical flame still burns strong. There are portraits off Marx and Lenin on the wall but it is another radical departure that we ponder over: the foundation of the Clann na Poblachta party exactly half a century ago: two years later it gave him a ministerial post, at the age of 32.

The occasion has been marked by a book, The Clann, written by RTE journalist Kevin Rafter and published by Mercier Press. Rafter recalls the intense excitement at the Clann's foundation and the high hopes that it would supplant Fianna Fail as the main political party in the State, but with a more radical agenda on the North and on social issues and greater integrity in public administration.

Although Browne shared those high hopes and still cherishes the opportunity he had as Minister for Health to do great good, looking back he wonders if they were really all that different from Fianna Fail. "When they failed so miserably on the first fence of giving mothers and children a better health service, you have to wonder whether they were serious."

An uneasy alliance of ex-IRA members and social welfare radicals, the Clann lacked the discipline and cohesion which Fianna Fail possessed at the time. It never recovered from the Mother and Child trauma and limped on in a shadowy half-life before switching off its own life-support in 1965.

Browne blames the conservative instincts Irish republicans had developed over the years, embodied in Dev's 1937 constitution which he says turned the South into a "Catholic state for a Catholic people". As he sees it, republicans betrayed their secular, pluralist roots in the French revolution and made an abject surrender to Rome Rule.

Browne sees Ireland in 1996 as a place where the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer; where drugs are a scourge like TB in his own day; where the population is not reproducing itself in significant numbers; unemployment is rampant; many children still go to bed hungry; education is elitist and so are the arts, insofar as they exist at all.

He searches for the words: "It is a country of privilege and we're so proud of it, it's hard to credit that we could be so complacent." The health scene is "the same, there is exactly the same privilege". Thousands are waiting to get into hospital but if you can pay you get the best care, probably in Europe.

Browne protests that he is not bitter. "Bitterness is a sterile emotion, I don't feel it at all." If he was still young enough, he would like to be back in the Dail himself which he found "a marvellous sounding-board".

But he regrets the decline in spontaneity and ex tempore speaking and deplores the rise of the "kept person", "minder" or "spin-doctor". As Browne sees it, these unelected Svengalis are hijacking the political process, writing speeches and giving advice in accordance with their own private agenda.

"It's a one-party state. There's no significant difference between any of the parties at the present time. Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, they're all utterly interchangeable."

BEHIND it all he sees the moulding influence of Mother Church, through her formative role in the education system. "We took power down here in the Republic from Britain and handed it over then, effectively, to the other great imperial power, Rome.

Don't imagine that he's mellowed, but Browne does acknowledge some "marvellous changes" are taking place here.

Nevertheless, he believes Ireland has been "an incredibly ineptly-run society". Looking back he feels sorry for the "surplus population" who became Paddies and Biddies on the building sites and in the hotels and laundries of England.

He laments "the beautiful children who could have been musicians, artists, writers and scientists and all the marvellous things that education can bring to any one of us. They were denied all of these because the average family simply couldn't afford the fees needed to educate so many boys and girls. They ended up as coolie labour in countries all over the world."

Phyllis and himself are great enthusiasts for classical music, painting, ballet, theatre and opera but their opportunities have narrowed since they moved to Connemara. "Since our State was formed, the arts haven't crossed the Shannon." Browne declares. He doesn't subscribe to the notion of Galway as an Edinburgh-by-the-Corrib and charges that enormously wealthy city" with a parsimonious attitude to the arts. They've always had plenty of money and yet they've been always niggardly in their allocation." He worries too that the price of entry to many arts events excludes those who live in our Rahoons and Ballyfermots.

Another lonely campaigner in the Bad Old Days was Mary Robinson but Browne regrets her elevation from active, hands-on politics to Aras an Uachtarain. She was "extremely talented" and had "a lot to offer" and would have made an excellent minister working for an egalitarian society, especially the rights of women.

"A government department, is an absolutely marvellous institution. You are mollycoddled with skills and talented people and high-level minds of every kind." Mrs Robinson, he feels, could have achieved so much more if she had adopted such a role instead of taking up "an impotent titular post".

There were moves to have Browne himself adopted as, Labour's candidate for the Park in 1990. Since his days as a TD were over, Browne says he probably would have accepted the nomination for the job which was "a fantastic honour", although the social obligations of the presidency did not appeal to Phyllis and himself who, are "rather retiring people and introverts".

Mrs Robinson was Dick Spring's choice but Browne shows no obvious resentment. More generally, though, he worries about the influence of unelected advisers over Spring as well as the latter's apparent enthusiasm for the European Union. "I am sorry to see that Spring, who is the Labour leader, appears to have overlooked the fact that we opposed the Common Market."

Sean MacBride remains his bete noire. Expanding on a theme in his autobiography, he wonders if "Sean" was psychologically damaged as a child by having such a domineering mother as Maud Gonne. Maud showed him a childhood picture of her son with man of destiny" written on it. Given all the pressures in MacBride's upbringing, Browne says he was "marvellous to be as normal as he was".

LIKE Yeats, Noel Browne is spending his old age "in excited reverie", reliving old battles but alert as a bird to current events. His home on the lip of the Atlantic at the end of a near-interminable boreen leaves him exposed to the vagaries of wind and rain. But where else would he be except the centre of the storm?