Former minister for justice and attorney general Michael McDowell is a man with a “fearsome devotion” to Ireland, former president of Ireland Mary McAleese has said.
Launching The Definite Article, a collection of McDowell’s newspaper columns, Mrs McAleese said the Senator is equally dedicated to Ireland’s Constitution, “to its democracy, its principles, its people, its European character, as a sovereign State, and within the EU of course”.
Her words will attract attention, no doubt, given the speculation that McDowell may consider putting his hat into the ring to succeed Michael D Higgins in the presidential election later this year.
Praising his columns for offering “a particular vocation of civic leadership”, Mrs McAleese said Mr McDowell “can take an intellectual crowbar to just about anything and turn up the soil and see what’s under it”.
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“That is just so important. Civic intellectual leadership. The kind of provocative leadership that wants you to argue back,” said Mrs McAleese, who served two terms in Áras an Uachtaráin, ending in 2011.
She said McDowell’s grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, and so many others had suffered deeply during their efforts to free Ireland from “our miserable colonial imperial past” and “to give us what we have right now”.
Today, she said, the State is “one of the most stable, sane democracies in the world”.
In his political and legal life, McDowell, she said, “never flinched” from immersing himself in every political debate, where he was “not afraid”, did his research and headed into the argument with his “version of the truth”.
“We need people with that deep sense of civic leadership ... Because out there, there are forces ranged against it,” she said.
McDowell said he had not intended to publish a collected edition of his columns, but his publisher, Red Stripe Press’s Michael Brennan, proposed it when he did not meet the deadline for a book on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which is still “in gestation”.
In a March 2016 Irish Times column, McDowell warned of the danger that Donald Trump would pose if he secured the US presidency. “I don’t claim to be a prophet, it was simply based on the fact that I had taken the trouble to watch on YouTube his campaign speeches.”
He told the launch, held in the Royal Irish Academy, that while watching the videos he had absorbed “the psychology of it, all the paranoia and all the potential for evil”.
He “likened” the experience of watching Trump’s campaign footage to the warnings offered by former Berlin-based Irish diplomat Daniel Binchy, who warned of the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1932.
Binchy had captured Hitler “spot on”, while others underplayed the threat he posed, said McDowell.
“He dealt with the hatred, he dealt with the war memory, he dealt with the divisiveness and evil of the man.”
