Noël Christopher Browne (20 December 1915 – 21 May 1997) was an Irish politician who served as Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951 and Leader of the National Progressive Democrats from 1958 to 1963.

However, he is also widely credited as being a progressive force in Ireland who advocated against corporal punishment and apartheid while supporting contraceptives, abortion and the LGBT community many decades before those positions became mainstream.

Fearing that if she and the children remained in Ireland that they would be forced into a workhouse, Mary (already by this point dying of TB) sold every possession the Brownes had and took the family to London, England.

He then won a scholarship to Beaumont College, the Jesuit public school near Old Windsor, Berkshire, where he befriended Neville Chance, a wealthy boy from Dublin.

Neville, son of surgeon Sir Arthur Gerard Chance, subsequently paid Browne's way through medical school at Trinity College Dublin.

He considered both his survival and his level of education a complete fluke, a stroke of random chance that saved him when he was seemingly destined to die unknown and in poverty like the rest of his family.

The health reforms coincided with the development of a new vaccine and of new drugs (e.g. BCG and penicillin) that helped to treat a previously untreatable group of medical conditions.

This plan, also introduced by the 1947 Health Act, provided free state-funded healthcare for all mothers and children aged under 16, with no means test, a move which was regarded as radical at the time in Ireland, but not in the rest of Europe.

Under pressure from bishops, the coalition government backed away from the Mother and Child Scheme and forced Browne's resignation as Minister for Health.

[7] The Taoiseach, John A. Costello, immediately retorted that "I have seldom listened to a statement in which there were so many — let me say it as charitably as possible — inaccuracies, misstatements and misrepresentations", and delivered his full reply several hours later.

[8] Following his departure from government, Browne embarrassed his opponents by arranging for The Irish Times to publish Costello's and MacBride's correspondence with the Catholic hierarchy, which detailed their capitulation to the bishops.

The hierarchy would not accept a no-means-test mother-and-infant scheme even when Fianna Fáil reduced the age limit from sixteen years to six weeks, and the government again backed down.

After his resignation as Minister for Health, Browne left Clann na Poblachta, but was re-elected to the Dáil as an Independent TD from Dublin South-East in the subsequent election.

He remained in the Seanad until the 1977 general election, when he gained the Dublin Artane seat as an Independent Labour TD, having again failed to get the Party nomination.

Dick Spring, the Labour Party leader, had made clear early in January 1990 his conviction that there should be a contest for the presidency and even offered to stand himself if no other candidate was forthcoming for the presidential election.

Browne spent the remaining seven years of his life constantly criticising her, whether that involved calling the presidency an "impotent, titular post" or reacting to Robinson placing a symbolic lamp in the window of her official residence upon election (as a reminder of all of those forced to leave Ireland to seek work) in a letter to family by stating, "May one grieving Irish family, among those bidding farewell and those left behind, tell our roving president her fatuous, low-watt, low-powered, `cheapest available, warmly welcoming electrical' candle brought no comfort to our diaspora and could now, permanently, be switched off.

[21] Writing a decade later, one of the chief officials of the Labour Party, Fergus Finlay, said Browne had developed into a "bad tempered and curmudgeonly old man".

[22] Historian and political scientist Maurice Manning wrote that Browne "had the capacity to inspire fierce loyalty, but many of those who worked with and against him over the years found him difficult, self-centred, unwilling to accept the good faith of his opponents and often profoundly unfair in his intolerance of those who disagreed with him".