The most striking thing about President Catherine Connolly’s inauguration address was its boldly political tone.
Some of its earliest lines referred to the housing crisis – evoking “a home as a human right” – which might be seen as indirectly criticising Government policy.
Connolly unapologetically set out a vision of the presidency as a “catalyst for change” to shape a “new Republic that lives up to its name”. She certainly didn’t limit herself to the wholesome abstractions we usually expect of such events.
While Connolly clearly understands her election as giving her a mandate to exhort political change, she doesn’t see this as being limited simply to articulating high-level ideals, but rather as enabling her to speak truth to power, perhaps even as criticising Government policy failings.
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Inevitably, some will criticise this strident vision as overstepping the proper constitutional boundaries of the office.
They will say the Constitution envisages no policy role for the president, that it makes the Government the sole executive power. They may worry it risks provoking a constitutional crisis.
It is true that the Constitution makes the president a subordinate political figure in many ways. The president, for example, needs the Government’s permission to leave the State or to address a message to the nation.
And yet, any constitutional limits on the president’s voice are fairly fuzzy and have probably evolved over time. While the President must receive Government approval for any “address” to the nation, this article likely applies only to a set-piece state of the nation-style speech, as it also requires she convoke the Council of State in advance.
Some will argue it is still implicit the president should stay clear of political controversies. But the constitutional boundaries of the role are vaguely defined, at least in this regard; any such limits that do exist are not legally enforceable, and they are based as much on shifting political conventions and public understanding as they are on the letter of the constitutional text.
Indeed, whatever the arguments in the abstract for a more limited presidential role, that ship has clearly sailed for quite some time now.
The president can only make good on their mandate in the realm of symbolism and speech
Connolly’s expansive vision of the office, as a source of political critique, is at odds with the practices that prevailed in the State’s early decades. Yet her bolder vision is hardly new. It has been established at least since the election of Mary Robinson, with the first woman president having memorably declared, in her own inauguration speech that her election had “rocked the system”.
Michael D Higgins was probably more outspoken, in turn, on specific political controversies, intervening on matters like housing and social exclusion, while making pronouncements on international affairs that were not always in sync with the Government.
While he was criticised for this and some Government figures privately grumbled, Higgins’s “activism” was more or less tolerated over 14 years, causing embarrassment at most but never outright confrontation. There was certainly nothing that might be described, even melodramatically, as a constitutional crisis.
Such precedent matters, because the norms comprising our constitutional system are based on political conventions, as well as on strictly legal interpretations of constitutional text. The bolder conception of the presidency is probably here to stay. It has been acquiesced to by successive governments, and is popular with the public.
In that sense, Connolly is probably only intensifying an activist conception of the presidency that is by now well accepted or even expected. The same factors that prevented successive Governments from confronting Higgins will probably avert any constitutional crisis during Connolly’s tenure.
Realpolitik favours acquiescence: presidents tend to be popular, and any Government seen as silencing an outspoken president would look like a bully.
From a wider perspective, the historical shift to an activist conception of the presidency reflects a number of peculiar historical trends.
Firstly and most simply, it probably reflects the decline of social deference and homogeneity, and a shift towards a more conflictual, oppositional pattern of politics over time.
Secondly, and more subtly, it reflects a constitutional anomaly. In contrast with other parliamentary republics, the Irish president is elected directly by the people. While this gives the president an immense symbolic mandate, the Constitution gives them little hard power through which to exercise that.
The president, therefore, can only make good on their mandate in the realm of symbolism and speech. The presidential voice is an expression both of legitimacy and of legitimation – that is, a way of giving the president’s mandate some concrete object.
Thirdly and most importantly, it reflects a wider process by which left-wing and progressive aspirations have become transmuted to the symbolic realm. While the era of neoliberal capitalism has reduced the autonomy of the sovereign nation-state, this is particularly truer in a small, open state like Ireland, dependent on FDI and particular patterns of capital flow. It becomes progressively more difficult, even abstract or utopian, to envisage what a break from neoliberal capitalism might look like in practice.
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Partly, though not only for this reason, we inhabit a political era where political ambitions are often transmuted to the symbolic - where there is a tendency, especially on the left, to take refuge in symbolic victory, instead of pushing for material change.
This is an era where it was somehow imagined that mere constitutional affirmations about the rights of children or about the value placed on care would somehow effect some appreciable changes in people’s real lives.
The symbolic power exercised by the president would probably only ultimately matter to most people if it were to have some wider effect in that material realm of politics. It would be difficult to argue that the eloquent speeches of Higgins had any such effect.
And while the political movement behind Connolly is quite different in breadth and scope, the real test will be whether the soft power of the presidency ripples beyond the realm of the symbolic.
Eoin Daly is a lecturer in law in the University of Galway
