Sir, - John Bowman's article on Dr John Charles McQuaid and Dr Noel Browne (News Features, November 6th) was thought-provoking. Mr Bowman expresses surprise at the inclusion of a "smoking gun" (Dr Browne's essay intimating that Dr McQuaid was a paedophile) in Dr Browne's papers, given that Dr Browne supposedly "felt sorry for the Archbishop". Yet later in the article Mr Bowman repeats the assertion that Dr Browne's private papers were "casually and haphazardly handled during his lifetime". If this is true, perhaps we shouldn't read too much into what is included in them, or omitted. Mr Bowman asserts that "a close analysis of his book [Dr Browne's autobiography Against the Tide] shows Browne's reconstruction of events to be self-serving .. ." I would say there is an element of truth in this. Dr Browne was a great man, but he was human. In writing his autobiography he was effectively judge in his own case.
In the book he refers to a speech he made in Waterford on April 23rd, 1971 about the power of the Catholic church and the adverse reaction he provoked by that speech. He says, among other things: "All this tirade was because I had dared to refer to the possibility of ambivalent and confused sexual attitudes among some of those who choose voluntary celibacy in religious orders, and had asked whether there might not be undesirable repercussions for our children."
The reader of the book is left with the impression that, not alone was Dr Browne aware of sexual abuse by some of the clergy, but that he spoke publicly about it as far back as 1971.
I looked up the archives of The Irish Times for April 24th, 1971 for a report on the previous day's speech. It reported him as saying, among other things, that Catholic clergy could not give advice on marriage and the human condition as they "had deserted the battlefield as laymen knew it". They had "chosen celibate lives because they find the whole subject of sex and heterosexual relationships threatening and embarrassing. Their judgment, then, cannot be trusted on these issues."
All pretty heavy stuff for 1971, but there was no mention or hint in The Irish Times report of Dr Browne raising the possibility of there being "undesirable repercussions for our children." - Yours, etc.,
Michael McGuire, Speenogue, Burt, Co Donegal.