IT seemed strangely appropriate that the election campaign should be punctuated at about midpoint by the death of Dr Noel Browne. For all the inevitable sadness in losing so great a man, the timing of his exit allows the deep unconscious of what is left of Irish society to fully reflect on what we have lost.
For nothing is as telling about the state of that society as the comparison between Dr Browne and the excited but unexciting bunch of underachievers who recently sought our votes.
Dr Browne made most of his greatest practical contributions to Irish society before I was born. The highlights are well enough remembered to make further mentions unnecessary. But Dr Browne, by his very presence and the nature of it, bore witness to the possibility that there is a vision of politics besides the one with which we are incessantly assaulted.
To be able to reflect on his death in the midst of discussions about whether one party leader stole a march on another by wearing a more fetching tie is, in a strange way, a profound privilege as well as a saddening and disturbing experience.
What made Noel Browne special was his passion. It was a passion based on the raw experience of poverty, pain and desolation, forged into a set of beliefs, developed in learning and tested in a lifetime's experience of the workings of power. And it never dimmed for one moment.
His analysis of Irish society went back to the Norman invasion, and the collaboration between Rome and Britain in the subjugation of the Irish mind. Unlike the pseudoliberals of Modern Ireland, whose opposition to church or State is founded on a superficial neurosis, his anger was directed at the workings of totalitarianism, colonialism and the power of wealth and privilege.
He was alive always to the ways in which these forces can alter their shape, and find newer and more subtle ways of oppressing humanity.
At no time in our 75 years of alleged freedom, he said in Belfast a few years ago, had the Irish people enjoyed complete control of their affairs. He was as angered, near the end, by the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger as he had been by the behaviour of the Catholic hierarchy a half century before.
IT is perhaps unfair to both parties to compare him to what might be termed normal politicians. "When," he once asked, "will the profession of politics in the Republic, on the success of which depends the happiness of all of us, become the supreme vocation, whose practice demands not just fair weather, self indulgent tinkering, but a lifelong dedication, unlimited political scholarship, and literacy at the highest level?"
He was in no doubt about the source of this disjunction in recent times, nor was he afraid to voice it. In an article for a magazine I edited a decade ago, he wrote about the major structural changes under way in western democracies "as a result of the acquisition and control of the national news media by already wealthy men, such as Murdoch, O'Reilly and others, whose main concern in the interelection period is to cajole the electorate into a ready acceptance at election time of men and women as leaders who are antagonistic in every way to the welfare of ordinary people".
This he believed, had grave implications for society. "These millionaires," he argued, "are concerned solely with conserving that society in which they have come to enjoy their great wealth and privilege for themselves and the class they represent.
Journalism, he said, was the modern equivalent of the priesthood. Just as the child and adolescent was "cared for" in the education system, the adult is delivered by the newspapers. In this analysis lies most of the explanation for the utter failure of the recent election campaign to offer true alternatives or discuss the issues of real importance.
He was angered, too, by the myth of public conservatism. He believed that, given a chance, the people would instinctively incline towards a radical solution. We were cursed, he believed, with politicians who seemed to want position rather than power, and who, when they achieved power, made no effort to exercise it on behalf of those they were supposed to be representing.
In this, too, we have a succinct encapsulation of the charade to which we have just been subjected. He was virtually unique in the past generation in belonging to the category of politicians who sought power in order to improve society.
THE great tragedy for the Republic, he believed, was that, instead of entering public life, many of our "egocentric political dilettantes" did not take up golf, sailboarding, hare coursing or cordon bleu cooking. In his choice of retirement location, a cottage by the Atlantic in Connemara, Dr Browne chose to live out his days as far as possible from the dilettantes in Dublin.
It is strange to think that with the entire political spectrum now surrendered to the syndrome outlined above, virtually the only voices in Irish society consistently articulating the perspective which Dr Browne stood for are priests and nuns of the Catholic Church.
As I have written recently, the only questioning of the myth of the Celtic Tiger, indeed the only genuine opposition available to Irish politics, is now provided by the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI), which again in this election has put our supposedly left wing parties to shame.
Noel Browne and any element of the Catholic church might seem unlikely bedfellows, but nothing in this apparent paradox is surprising to me. For the leading lights of CORI, Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds, belong much more to the tradition represented by Dr Browne than to that of the institution with which he spent so much time in conflict.
"I often wonder," he said when I first met him a good few years ago, "if the church wasn't so powerful, would we have a better socialist movement, because you'd get more thoughtful people into socialism, if this great organisation wasn't assimilating a whole lot of very kindly, good people?"
For all that he did not believe in a God, for all his opposition to the church of Rome, Dr Browne was a deeply spiritual man, who exuded not only passionate concern for those left behind in our society's rush to escape from its past, but a deep sense of his role as part of the conscience of a society brutalised by that past beyond ken of right and wrong.
His was a voice with the power to subdue tigers. The one certainty which emerged from the past month is that we will never, ever see his likes again.