The author John Horgan is unusually punctual for one of his profession. He delivered the manuscript of Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider a full year early. Horgan, says Fergal Tobin, publishing director of Gill and Macmillan, misread the date on the contract.
The author's old Labour colleague, Michael D. Higgins, launched the book at the National Museum this week and there was a big turnout of comrades past and present. Indeed, Horgan wondered how many of the gathering - which included Labour leader Ruairi Quinn, Pat Rabbitte, Emmet Stagg, Joe Costelloe, Joan Burton, Eithne FitzGerald and Barry Desmond, whose memoirs will be out next week - might be described as Cuffe Street Irregulars after the branch which was always a thorn in the side of the leadership. Maurice Manning, a fellow author, appeared to be the only outsider.
Sean Lemass, Horgan said, had remarked that Browne and Jack McQuillan were the only opposition in the Dail. He meant it to drive Fine Gael and Labour mad - and it did. If they could have have been cloned, he believed politics would be different today. Browne had sounded a note at a time when there was no orchestra, or if there was it was out of tune or would not have had him as conductor. He would not want a monument or a book as a memorial but a decent health service.
Higgins said it was wrong to describe him as midwife to Browne's autobiography, Against the Tide. Better to compare him to Kofi Annan in the Middle East, such were the dealings between author and publisher.
As a former parliamentarian, Horgan was able to elicit the nuance behind the formal language of parliamentary party meetings and administrative council resolutions "before the sanitising rinse of press officers" was seen as essential.
Higgins said he himself had had no interest in standing for the presidency in 1990, but when he and Stagg's nominee, Browne, was defeated, he had enthusiastically supported Mary Robinson's campaign.
"The description of me, in the biography of our former president, as being unenthusiastic is unworthy of the informant and untrue." But that, he said, was material for another day.
Quidnunc can be contacted by e-mail at rholohan@irish-times.ie