I OWE my existence to Dr Noel Browne. My very existence, not just my life. I have not always been grateful.
My father and mother met at one of the sanitoriums he set up in the late 1940s and early 1950s to fight TB. Castlerea, to be exact.
The mental hospital in that Roscommon town was taken over, the psychiatric patients were transferred elsewhere, and it became the main centre in the west for treating TB patients, until Merlin Park opened in Galway in 1952.
My father already worked at Castlerea, as a psychiatric nurse. My mother began work at the new sanitorium in December 1948, as a student nurse. My grandmother and grandfather, and my uncle Pat - her twin brother - did everything they could to stop her - they were afraid she might get TB - but to no avail. That's my mother. A will of steel, except when it comes to sweets.
Not that she was inspired by any Holy Joe idealism, either. She wanted a job and independence, and Noel Browne gave her both. All her life she has been planning to write to him, particularly since she read Against the Tide. But she didn't. That's my mother too.
She has been giving up sweets since before I was born. She just wanted to thank him for what he had done for her - "he was the first man to give me a job" - and for what he did for all those hundreds of TB patients. "We thought he was God," she said.
Out in Coffins
It was awful at the beginning, she remembers. "They [the patients] came in on stretchers and went out in coffins." My father remembers the patients "dying like flies". Young men like him had enough to do just carrying the patients in on arrival, and the dead out. And the surgery at the time was primitive.
Ribs would be removed, "a couple at a time" over three separate operations, to collapse the lungs, my mother said. Parts of lungs would be taken out. It was "brutal, terrible". He himself had to be retrained to nurse TB patients, and most of his work in the early days was taken up with palliative care, relieving pain.
At first patients were confined to bed after operations, then they were put on their feet the very next day, to undergo physiotherapy, "with the blood seeping through the stitches" he said.
But the atmosphere was very "happy golucky", which is hardly surprising as most of the staff and patients were young people. "Very beautiful boys and girls," my mother remembers the patients. My father said the female ward was like something out of Hollywood. "The finest looking girls you'd see, and all dead in a week." My father likes hyperbole.
Even the high death rate didn't affect the place, as would be expected. There was "no moodiness, except for the odd oul' staff nurse," said my mother. But they were always afraid of their lives bringing the bodies to the morgue at night. Bodies were removed to the morgue only at night. Then streptomycin came on stream, and soon people did not need any more brutal surgery.
`Glorious' Social Life
"The social life at Castlerea was glorious", both remember, as they should. Badminton, tennis, football, and dancing, there was lots of it all at "the san" - though the staff did not like that name, sanatorium. They preferred to refer to it as "St Patrick's hospital".
My mother's great friend from those days, Katie Callaghan, also has vivid memories of the great social life. Her memories of the misery are vivid too - the relatives "bawling crying" as they went away heartbroken, knowing whoever they had just left in would not be out for three or four years, if ever.
Even today she knows people who had their ribs removed in TB operations. Their shoulders sag.
My father remembers the stigma associated with the disease, and with the nursing staff at the sanatorium, in the beginning. People in Castlerea "were afraid of their lives" to have anything to do with the nurses in case they would pick up the disease. They did not want to serve them in shops, pubs, or cafes, he says. But "eventually they ended up marrying them."
Many members of the great Roscommon all Ireland (1943/44) football team ended up as - TB patients there too. A regular visitor was Jack McQuillan, on the potent platform of TB and football, entered the Dail with Noel Browne in 1948, and - remained one of his most loyal supporters until 1965, when he lost his seat.
Another man with reason to be grateful to Noel Browne is Nicky Kelly. He remembers him as "confidant and friend" for many years. Politically, Dr Browne supported him in his pursuit of justice and professionally he helped him deal with the trauma of what he went through in the immediate aftermath of the Sallins train robbery.
He remembers Dr Browne as "a very honest, very frank individual, a rare breed".
Hurtling to Rage
I first saw Dr Browne in the flesh as a student in Galway. He was slight, soft spoken, not at all the stuff of legend. He was barely audible. Then gradually we were drawn into his train of thought, as it and he grew in volume, hurtling to such rage as I have rarely witnessed.
The subject was one of the myriad injustices with which he was preoccupied. The substance I forget, but the style of expression, the sincerity of his anger and its depth, will always remain fresh.
I saw him for the last time in February this year, in a dining hall at Trinity College. I was returning from a day's reporting at the hepatitis C tribunal, and seeing him there with friends, bright and sprightly, I wondered what he must have thought of all that. Not wishing to intrude, I guessed. It took little imagination. May he rest in peace.