Soon after his inauguration in 2011, Michael D Higgins said he would seek to make his tenure a “presidency of ideas”. His ambition was honourable – and vital. How well has it been delivered and communicated? What difference has that made?
As he put it in his 2016 collection of presidential speeches, When Ideas Matter: Speeches for an Ethical Republic, “words are a great gift. They are all the power that some people, and often entire peoples and classes, have. To be given the opportunity to offer a critique of current circumstances, with their threats and their possibilities, is a great privilege.”
That notion of critique has been central to the Higgins presidency, in its negative and positive senses. It draws on his philosophical, sociological and literary backgrounds as well as his political one. His alertness to changing circumstances provides continuity in this endeavour.
A sharply critical report this week from the European Environment Agency saying Ireland’s nature (like Europe’s) is in “very poor shape”, threatened further by agriculture, forestry and urban sewage discharges, is a timely benchmark for such an appraisal. It highlights Ireland’s failure to create a circular economy where goods and services are routinely shared, repaired, reused or recycled. “Ireland’s economy remains substantially linear, marked by material overconsumption” and needs scaled-up infrastructural investment.
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These findings touch on a core theme of Higgins’s presidential ideas – his critique of unbridled individualism in economic theory and practice. Connected to this is the undervaluing of solidarity, collective action, redistribution, equality, mutuality and reciprocity.
There has been a loss of political cohesion and public space to contest such unthinking changes. We need to reassert social policy choices like “inclusion versus exclusion; activity versus passivity; democratic control versus monopoly; freedom versus captivity”, as he said in a 2023 lecture to economists and social scientists.
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He blames the crude Chicago school of neoliberal economics for this ideology of consumption, commodification, acquisition and assumption that markets self-regulate. Its uncritical acceptance by an Irish society deeply embedded in such late capitalist practices as it navigated successfully towards prosperity on globalisation’s seaways from the 1990s is not surprising. Higgins saw it as his task to provide intellectual tools for a better informed citizen and public policy response to its many downsides after the 2008 crash exposed them so painfully.
His prolific speeches and writings on these topics are a highlight of his two-term presidency. They have found many economists mystified and annoyed, as are many centre-right political leaders and mainstream media commentators. They rarely respond intellectually in kind and often disregard or dismiss his rhetoric as abstract verbosity.
Yet Higgins has found a wider appreciative audience in Ireland, around Europe and internationally for these ideas. They have bolstered Ireland’s reputation as a state and society which welcomes adventurous thinking beyond the prevailing consensus – all the more so in such a challenging time for humanity in nature.
His uncanny ability to gauge and engage public opinion as a more complex Irish society demands such gaps and deficits be addressed and acted on unnerves the mainstream establishment. It adds a fresh dimension to the more maximalist presidencies of his predecessors Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese who also broadened the appeal of the office.
Yes, Higgins is prone to verbosity – partly to avoid engagement in everyday policy debates; but his political and communication skills and broader artistic and popular interests have carried him through those traps. Overall, many people are proud to recognise his intellectual capacity and international appeal. He remains impressively abreast of critical thinking in ethics, social theory and political economy, as is evident from his speeches to universities, think tanks and policy institutes.
His favourite international thinkers include the German philosophical sociologist Hartmut Rosa. He works on resonance, combining affection, emotion and reflection. These qualities contradict alienating and atomised individualism in the relentlessly accelerating pace of late capitalist society and technology. Critical social and ecological theorists like Kate Raworth, Tim Jackson, Anna Coote, Mariana Mazzucato and Ian Gough are frequently invoked, as are Irish sociologists Peadar Kirby and Mary P Murphy. Classical favourites often cited include Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, Alvin Gouldner, James C Scott – and James Mittelman for his work on globalisation from below.
Many of these would qualify as Donald Trump’s radical left or Marxist lunatics. But in these dangerous days, one lunacy invites and requires another, especially given the pathetic mediocrity of most liberal and centre left responses to Trump and his ilk.
Patrick Cockburn concludes the fine recent biography of his father and fellow journalist Claud by recalling how he preferred telling truth to the powerless than to the powerful “so they have a fighting chance against the big battalions”. That is the spirit in which we should celebrate and salute the Higgins presidency of ideas.
