Michael D Higgins has rung in his last new year as Ireland’s President.
Before the end of 2025, somebody else will be climbing into bed in Áras an Uachtaráin, inspecting guards of honour, receiving ambassadors’ credentials and attending football matches on behalf of the people. We won’t realise how much we’ll miss him until he’s gone.
It’s hard to believe nearly 14 years have gone by since the former Labour Party TD and senator first swept into the land’s highest office with a record total vote exceeding one million.
A firebrand with a fierce, countercultural intellectualism, there was pomp in his posture and in his polemics. This funny-sounding little poet heaving with lofty thoughts was exactly what the doctor ordered for Ireland in 2011 when, as he said in his first inauguration speech, we had been left “fragile as an economy [and] wounded as a society”.
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Ireland has changed since then. It has been transmogrified from an impecunious and beaten-down land of ghost-estates and bankrupts into one groaning under the infrastructural inadequacies partly brought about by full employment and a population explosion.
Change in Higgins, affectionately known as Miggeldy and inspiration for a million teapot cosies, has been less dramatic. He has shrunk a little in the intervening years and has taken to walking with the aid of sticks after suffering a stroke last February. But he has outlasted four taoisigh, his two faithful dogs, Síoda and Bród, and, at the age of 83, he is as bold as ever. Hallelujah!
During his presidency, Higgins has infuriated a smorgasbord of EU officials, the Israeli government, powerful international ratings agencies, Ireland’s academy of economists, critics of Fidel Castro, revisionist historians, Northern Ireland unionists and, undoubtedly, various Dublin ministers who have kept a judicious silence, knowing they could not possibly compete with his popularity. The era of unremitting blandness in the Aras is well and truly over.
Higgins’s less than lightly-worn smarts are the unique selling point that won him a second term as President in 2018, supported by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The thanks they got was his scathing critique of the housing crisis as “our great, great failure”.
Sure, he tends to be verbose. His long-windedness is positively labyrinthine and he is possessed of an oratory style that smacks of contrived posh. Yet these traits are refreshing in a world of slick soundbites and social media knee-jerkiness and make him all the more endearing.
Besides, we Irish like to think ourselves collectively atypical and are proud to have chosen someone radically unconventional to be our President. The very fact that we elect our head of State gives the incumbent a psychological license to be a voice, not for the establishment, but for the people.
Not everyone is a Michael D fan. His outpourings may have gladdened many hearts but they have alienated many others. Among the latter are those who cavilled at his decision not to attend the 2021 ceremony in Armagh to mark Ireland’s partition and the creation of Northern Ireland; his praise for Fidel Castro and his congratulatory letter to Iran’s new president, which he baldly accused Israel of leaking and which Israel denied. Higgins has insisted that his words and actions have not breached the constitutional parameters of his office prescribed by Article 13.9.
That article reads like an á la carte menu. The president’s functions, it says, “shall be exercisable and performable by him [my italics] only on the advice of the government, save where it is provided by this Constitution that he shall act in his absolute discretion or after consultation with or in relation to the Council of State, or on the advice or nomination of, or on receipt of any other communication from any other person or body”.
Ever since Mary Robinson’s election in 1990, the president’s remit has been debated and undergone expansion, pioneered by the incumbents’ interpretation of what is permissible. Higgins has repeatedly pushed at the established limits of the office. The result has been an Irish solution to an Irish problem, otherwise known as turning a blind eye by governments loath to be seen admonishing the country’s most popular office holder.
The inevitable consequence of this political expedience is that, over time, it disempowers the President’s voice. Ignoring his utterings reduces him to a tokenistic national mascot. For what is the point in toiling over profound and learned speeches if those who most need to hear them turn an indulgently deaf ear?
Instead of continuing this nod-and-wink charade between the Áras and Government Buildings, what the president may and may not do needs to be clarified by the incoming government before the election for Higgins’s successor in the autumn.
Robinson, who was the first to take the broom to the constitutional cobwebs of the Áras, was a renowned lawyer who won landmark constitutional cases in the courts. Mary McAleese, her successor, had been a law professor in Trinity College before becoming the director of the Institute of Legal Studies at Queens University. Higgins is so scholarly he recites Nietzsche as readily as the Pope recites the rosary. There is no guarantee the next president will be an avid reader of Bunreacht na hÉireann. Think Jedward.
More than one million voters did not choose Higgins to be the President in the expectation that he would sit demurely in the Phoenix Park embroidering cushion covers and pouring tea into dainty cups for VIP visitors. He was someone born to rock the system.
At times, when he goes on his anti-establishment, bolshie sorties, firing rockets at the system, the establishment throws its eyes to heaven behind closed doors while resolutely saying nothing in public.
And sometimes, the body politic is glad to have a maverick in the Park who will tell it like it is because, over in Government Buildings, they can’t. If the presidency is to be curtailed by a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, or to be let loose by ignoring any potential contraventions or used as a convenient outlet for unsayable government thoughts, the people should be told. Because the presidency is the people’s voice.