NOEL BROWNE was one of the few. Even among those for whom the past truly is another country, the name evokes a time and place in which illness, poverty and fear ruled - and ruined - the lives of many.
Life in this State, which had so lately secured its independence, was governed, not only by fear of TB but by a grim insistence on obedience to authority in any shape or form, lay or clerical.
The result was a bleak political landscape, in which resistance was most often expressed in sporadic bursts of violence: a form of protest the lately established authorities had learned to anticipate and crushed with ease.
Browne, whose earliest memories were of Athlone during the Civil War, chose a more subtle path to freedom and, though he had friends and allies who were republicans, he always saw violence, not as a solution to the condition he wanted to change but as one of its causes.
He is sometimes called an idealist, as if that explained the rejection of his socialism by politicians and public, but the actions for which he is best remembered were far from quixotic.
He agreed to join Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s, not because he was stirred by the rhetoric of Sean MacBride, but because he was convinced that he could achieve more as a politician than as a doctor, even one devoting his time to work among the poorest of the poor.
He had grown up in a family devastated by illness, poverty and humiliation. He had enjoyed the generosity of benefactors who supported him while he studied medicine at Trinity College and he had seen in postwar Britain the changes wrought in the health services under the humane leadership of the great Aneurin Bevan.
When Noel Browne became Minister for Health on his first day in the Dail in 1948, he already knew what was to be done. He led the campaign to eradicate tuberculosis and, with the help of some dedicated civil servants and newly designed treatment, succeeded in doing what others had long assumed to be impossible - indeed, beyond imagining.
For this, he earned the gratitude and respect of tens of thousands of people, many of whom would have had difficulty, to say the least, with the philosophy that inspired him.
As Minister for Health he also planned to help mothers and children by reintroducing and developing some modest proposals which had first been adopted and later abandoned by a Fianna Fail government. This was what came to be called the Mother and Child scheme.
THE Hierarchy opposed it, so did the doctors. Their interests coincided and reflected the prejudices of the time. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, claimed the State wished to assume responsibility for educating mothers in motherhood. It proposed to provide maternity and gynaecological services for women, dangerous powers for the State to arrogate to itself.
Then, as Browne wrote in his autobiography, Against The Tide, the Archbishop mentioned possibilities which, in the early 1950s, were quite unthinkable: "He postulated the inevitability of contraception and abortion."
The Bishop of Galway had more immediate concerns: "[He] took up a question dear to his heart, that of the burden of rates and taxation. He claimed that it was unfair to tax the rest of the community in order to give the poor a free health service."
The political divisions, which the objections of the doctors and the bishops provoked, might not have proved fatal if Clann na Poblachta itself was not already divided to the point of disintegration. But once the letters exchanged by the bishops and the Government were published in The Irish Times, the affair had taken the shape which would be remembered.
Historians might pick over some point of detail, the message was plain: Home Rule was Rome Rule; a cowardly government had sacrificed Browne to expediency and the bishops. It would be decades before any other Irish politician dared challenge Catholic orthodoxy. We would have Irish solutions to Irish problems as testimony to their hypocrisy.
But Noel Browne didn't opt out; he fought on, briefly as an Independent and a member of Fianna Fail. In happier times, first in the National Progressive Democrats, later in the Labour Party, with his old comrade, Jack McQuillan of Roscommon, of whom he was to write: "[McQuillan] was to become probably the most valuable and talented of all the deputies elected for Clann na Poblachta or any other party."
Browne never ceased to be a thorn in authority's side, whether as deputy or senator, making the case for contraception when all but a few deputies and senators hung back, or as a delegate at Labour Party conferences, making the case against coalition when the odds were overwhelmingly against him and his cause.
In the early 1960s, he was among those attacked by dogs being used by gardai during a demonstration near the US Embassy against the Vietnam war. But his confrontations, however controversial, were invariably pacific.
HE AND Justin Keating led opposing sides in one of the most passionate and rational debates I can remember, at the Labour conference in Cork in 1973. The issue was the State's mineral resources and how best to use them for the benefit of the Irish people.
Browne warned against dealing with the multinational corporations whose interests were defended when and where it thought fit - regardless of cost - by the government and agencies of the United States.
The CIA had just been involved in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and a Chilean delegate had come to Cork to speak of his murder. Browne's warning about the multinationals ended with the whispered phrase "Ah, poor Allende" and his speech with Connolly's defiance: "We only want the earth."
It's said he was difficult at times, and so he was. The best to be said about that was that he was always more difficult with those who had power than with the majority who needed a voice.