A New Kind Of Presidency

First of all, apologies to the 60 senior citizens whose Áras an Uachtaráin Christmas dinner with the President I suspect I delayed. Hot Press’ end-of-year chat with Michael D. was supposed to last 30 minutes, but with neither interviewer nor interviewee known for their brevity, it’s a good hour-and-a-half before we emerge from his office. When we do it’s to a mock ‘tut!’ and rolling of the eyes from one of his press aides who then laughs, “We’re used to it. The President likes to make his point!”

Michael D. certainly made his point last month when reacting to the death of Savita Halappanavar. “My wish, frankly,” he responded at the time, “is that there be some form of investigation which meets the needs of the concerned public and meets the needs of the family and meets the need of the State.”
“Foul!” cried the Dáil Éireann anti-choice brigade who accused of him of straying into the political arena – a constitutional “no-no” when you’re Uachtarán na hÉireann.
“I can assure you as a political scientist for nearly 40 years, I’m very well aware of not only the constitutional limits on the president but what the people might correctly expect from their president,” he said, with obvious relish, seeing off critics like Fine Gael’s James Bannon and Fianna Fáil’s Billy Kelleher.
“I said it’s very important that the investigation be such as to satisfy the genuine concern of the Irish people… and in some small way to help in reducing the grief for Savita’s husband and family. It was no more and no less than that.”
The President now feeling that he’s dealt with it fully, has decided that he has no more to say on the subject. Otherwise, there are no pre-conditions as to what we can ask.
Having spent 35 years rocking in the Dáil - you may recall The Saw Doctors have a song about it! – it’s no surprise that Michael D. has made music and the arts in general a cornerstone of his presidency. Sharon Shannon played at his inauguration party; Ryan Sheridan was the strumming attraction at the Being Young & Irish seminar launch; he hosted a 50th birthday party a few days ago for The Dubliners and being received today before me is Marcus Connaughton, the RTÉ man who’s authored Rory Gallagher: His Life & Times.
“We’ve had quite a few late nights since the President and Mrs. Higgins moved in,” notes the Áras veteran who brings us our pre-interview tea (Earl Grey in bone china cups) and sandwiches (triangular with the crusts cut off). Which is only as it should be!
Talking recently to Vanity Fair, Barack Obama revealed that his first Presidential act was hanging up a picture of Martin Luther King in the Oval Office. Did Michael D. do a spot of redecorating when he took up residence in the Phoenix Park?
“Yes, I’ve Sean Keating’s portrait of Noel Browne,” he says referring to the legendary church-tackling Socialist politician. “It’s normally over that mantlepiece, but it’s being re-framed. It was painted in 1951 after he’d introduced the Mother and Child scheme. Niall Stokes (HP editor) gave me a photo of Phil Lynott and Rory Gallagher performing together in 1982 out in Punchestown, which is usually there too, but I took it down the other day to show somebody. I always have a couple of books on my desk – one of the current ones being From The Ruins Of Empire; The Revolt Against The West & The Remaking Of Asia by Pankaj Mishra, which was given to me by Bobby Gilmour. It deals for example with the moment China is contacted for the first time by Europe. So many scholars in places like Belgium have amnesia about their colonial past, but the wider world hasn’t.”
Did he enjoy the Dubliners’ knees-up?
“I did, we had just under a hundred people,” Michael D. enthuses. “John Sheahan, Barney’s brothers and all the families were here. It was a great session!”
Does he have a party piece reserved for such occasions?
“No, but in my previous life, just before the campaign for the presidency, I did four gigs with Mary McPartlan and her band. I remember doing Letterkenny, Manorhamilton, The Mermaid in Bray and Parknasilla. I’d done it before. I’ve performed my poem ‘The Mountain’ on stage with The Stunning. I’ve also done some pieces with others, it’s a great challenge.”
What he can and can’t say as president is something I talked to Michael D. about in June, at the breakfast briefing which accompanied the Being Young & Irish launch.
“This is a presidency of ideas, not abstract intellectual reflections,” he insisted. “There’s nothing to stop me talking about poverty or unemployment, issues that go beyond a particular government’s term and threaten the future. Politicians vote on bills, but a great deal of what happens is decided by those who are shaping decisions. The points of advocacy early on are very, very important.”
Which to my ears translated as, “I’m going to push it as far as the Constitution allows me, even if that does run the risk of irritating some of the lads in the Dáil.” The furore his Savita Halappanavar remarks generated underlines what a delicate balancing act this is.
“I’m neither the servant nor the opposition of the government of the day, whatever that government’s composition might be,” he notes today. “Under Article 28 of the Constitution, it states that every six weeks, the President shall be kept informed of matters international and domestic. The Taoiseach has come to this room – most meetings have been about two hours. It’s a two-way conversation. I talk to the Taoiseach about issues that may have been raised with me throughout the course of my previous six weeks.”
Would Michael D. say Enda and the chaps are happy with the way he’s conducted himself since taking office?
“I don’t ask whether they’re happy or not,” he says sharply. “I respect their role and they respect the independence of mine. It’s very important to realise that different people bring different things to the presidency. I feel for example that Paddy Hillery had a very developed sense of the rights of migrant workers. The presidency was entirely opened up then by Mary Robinson who brought a human rights perspective. Having been a distinguished constitutional lawyer and a legal theoriser, after her period at Harvard, she saw law as an instrument of social change. Her presidency had a particular focus on inclusion.
“Mary McAleese had experience of living in the minority tradition in northern Ireland as well as legal training, and saw what peace in Ireland would bring. When she used the phrase ‘building bridges’ it really meant a great deal. In my own case, I come from a particular experience of someone who had half of his family migrate in their early ‘20s to England. My father and my uncles were on different sides in the War of Independence. My father was in the Curragh during the Civil War, on the republican side. They never discussed it. I was 21 when I went to university. No one belonging to me had been near third level. I experienced the liberation of education. Intellectual work is something that’s very important to me. I’m just back from a visit to Liverpool, where I gave a lecture at the Institute of Irish Studies, and Manchester where I spoke about what it was like to be an Irish person in one’s 20s in Manchester from 1968 to 1971.”
A time when it was unusual not to see a prominent “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish” sign in hotel and guest-house windows.
“I think it’s been very clear in my presidency that I’d bring that kind of personal experience to it. Because I lectured as a political scientist on areas of the Constitution of Ireland, its limits and so forth. I know what the role of the President is. I don’t stray beyond that, but at the same time I realise there are ways of developing that role. I don’t speak on legislative proposals. That’s the government’s business. However, there are issues – poverty, inclusion, food security and so forth – that are broader and go past the life of any government. People would expect me to address those.”
To further define his presidency, Michael D. is conducting seven annual seminars during his term in the Áras. The first conducted this year was going to be called Being Young In Ireland but had its name changed to Being Young And Irish due to the ever-growing wave of emigration. What would the President say to the 21-year-olds leaving college who have no option but to hop on a plane or a boat?
“My immediate advice would be, ‘Please don’t lose connection with this country. Consider it as a future option for your return’. I very much want young people to live in Ireland and make their contribution. I’ve been in Britain four times so far as president, meeting the Irish living there. It’s something I used to do before taking office – once a year before Christmas. I appointed Sally Mulready to the Council of State specifically because of what she’d done for the Magdalene women and migrant groups at risk in London. They retire to their bedsitter and hardly ever come out.
“Many people from the previous migrations left not only for economic reasons but reasons of personal freedom. There were for example many gay men who are now older, and some of them quite vulnerable in London and elsewhere. In order to express their sexuality and live in the most basic, fundamental freedom, they had to flee this country. A great number leaving in the ‘50s and ‘60s felt the prospect of changing the legislation was near zero. Between 1955 and 1960, you never had less than 50,000 a year leaving. What I can do as president is raise the issues they talk to me about. I have a phrase, ‘Irish people together should celebrate not just their successes but their vulnerabilities’. When I go abroad I don’t just contact the most recent migrants. There are all these different streams in different places.”
Almost a hundred years of independence and we’re still reliant on British solutions to Irish problems.
“One of the things Ireland has to address in its culture is authoritarianism. I like to speak about the capacity for generosity that exists in this country. It wouldn’t be a good development if we decided to replace a fine sense of responding to others’ needs with narrow materialistic individualism. I don’t think individualism sits with the Irish character.”
While unable to indulge in the finely tuned analysis you suspect he’d like to – pesky constitution! – Michael D. remains eager to talk about the banking crisis and governments not facing up to financial facts.
“I have questioned the neo-liberal model,” he resumes. “A global recession was sparked off by the amendments to the Glass-Steagall Act in the United States. For decades that was resisted by American presidents, but eventually (the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve) Alan Greenspan said the markets are screaming for product and, if you like, a speculative form of product was thrashed into being. Here in Ireland, we had what you might call light regulation, which brought disaster that will take us a long time to recover from. So much of the present misery – and the misery for some years to come – has been created by accepting a model of the economy that was untested and devoid of ethical responsibility.”
How far down the road to economic recovery does the President think we are?
“The causes of the global crisis haven’t been adequately faced,” he warns. “The assumptions and edifice upon which some of the strongest western economies are based have not been adequately faced either. You could bring people out onto the streets of Chicago and LA and New York in favour of addressing the issues of poverty – but the problem is how do you move that consensus into the administration? You can’t do it without looking at the constraints that have been put on the administration by other forces. I think a debate is opening up in relation to the connection between the economy and society.”
Apologies in advance for the horrendous namedrop, but when – clang! – I met Bruce Springsteen in February he said that it was old fogeys like himself and Pete Seeger who are gauging, as he put it, “the distance between the American dream and the American reality.” Where are the young activists?
“For Being Young And Irish we had the participation of just under 800 young people,” the President enthuses. “We had four regional consultations in Monaghan, Galway, Cork and Dublin with 20 places reserved for those who wouldn’t normally have a voice – people with disability, people who are Travellers, significant minority groups, immigrants and so on. Some of the most moving to me were the submissions from young people in prison. They produced two documents – a Charter For Change and a Taking Charge Of Change Declaration. There was no evidence of cynicism at all – they really wanted to be engaged and right up at the top were things like respect for sexual orientation and mental health. With regards to education, they want civil and political studies and others revamped and earlier in the curriculum. There was support for philosophy at second level. They’re not cynical, but they do find it difficult to get their viewpoint into the institutional structure of the State.
“The Springsteen question is very, very interesting,” the President adds. “I think a new kind of advocacy is coming into being. There are people saying, ‘Obama spent the past two years preparing for the re-election. He was to some extent restricted, but now in the second term there’s hope’. Did you see the documentary shown recently on BBC 2, The Koch Brothers Exposed?”
I did and it made my blood boil. Charles and David Koch, two billionaire brothers, run Americans For Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, which campaigns on behalf of the country’s top-earning 1%.
“They’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that legislation doesn’t tax the super rich, and also running a campaign against Medicare,” he says with a shake of the head. As a Dáil deputy, Michael D. made his disdain for the American far-right abundantly clear two years ago when he was interviewed by right-wing chat show host Michael Graham.
“This Tea Party ignorance that’s being brought all around the United States is regularly insulting people who have been democratically elected,” he said at the time. When Graham accused him of displaying a “lack of knowledge” about US politics, the then Labour TD for Galway West retorted, “Be proud to be a decent American, rather than just a wanker whipping up fear.” The YouTube clip of the event went viral this year, with 1.8 million hearing his impressive dropping of the w-bomb.
“I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone else; I got maybe 300 letters from the United States following that interview, and most of them dealt with the issues of being poor in terms of Medicare and pensions and so forth.”
There are no expletives today, but the President is not happy with the continued right-wing attacks on his American counterpart.
“The tooth and claw nature of the political conflict (in the US) is striking,” he reflects. “I have a Kindle and if I tap in ‘Obama’ there are some books in print in the United States that wouldn’t get past any publisher in Europe because they’re so outrageously accusatory and vitriolic.”
It almost gets comical when you have Donald Trump banging on about Obama being born in Africa and calling for a revolution to remove him from the White House.
“The Donald Trump thing was quite unacceptable – though I don’t think it got much support in the United States. It’s of great concern that you have senior politicians there being financed by organisations that don’t represent either the American dream or the best of American values.”
One of the highlights of Michael D.’s presidential year was the South American tour that took him and his wife, Sabina, to Argentina, Brazil and Chile, which he previously visited during the Plebescito to determine whether or not Maggie Thatcher’s pal General Pinochet would end his near-17-year dictatorship.
“I was the first to go to Chile in 1988 after Augusto Pinochet said he’d arrest any international observers. I arrived as the ‘test person’ and was followed by 200 others. There was a group called Parliamentarians For Democracy who I liaised with. The present president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, is of the centre-right and had the greatest respect for my visit. I also met Patricio Aylwin, who was the first president after democracy was restored, and I met the daughter and granddaughter of the president Pinochet deposed, Salvador Allende.”
A national hero, Allende committed suicide rather than cede power to Pinochet when troops surrounded the presidential palace. President Higgins also paid his respects to Victor Jara, the singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1973 by the army.
“His wife Joan Turnern Jara gave me a present of log books of Victor’s songs, which I’m going to place in some public institution here in Ireland. I wasn’t going to Chile cold, just making an empty visit. In Brazil, I had a very long meeting with their president, Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor, Lula Da Silva. He’s been suffering from cancer but made the effort to come and see me in my hotel in Sao Paulo with his translator. In Argentina, where I’d been in 1995 with Mary Robinson when I was minister, I had a meeting with the families of The Disappeared (9,000 people kidnapped by the military junta during 1976 – 1983’s ‘Dirty War’ remain unaccounted for). It was interesting that when I met their president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, she said, ‘You’re the first head of state who’s opened a discussion with me on the subject of human rights’.
“Talking to the three presidents and former president Lula, they were very aware of the difference between Ireland with its independence and some of the other countries in Europe. The Irish ambassadors involved have told me that it was of great value to them.”
Spare time may have been at a premium this year in the Higgins household, but he’s managed to catch three of Irish television’s most talked about shows.
“From the one episode I watched I thought Love/Hate has very good production values,” he enthuses. “It portrays the awful waste of life that derives from these deadly networks. It’s also a reminder maybe to the people with responsibility that interventions have to be made as early as possible. Education and personal development are crucial. Literacy is an issue, which would be of major concern to me following my visits to prisons. I know Mario Rosenstock, so of course I watched his new show.”
Nervously from behind the settee?
“No, if you were to be upset by someone satirically portraying you on radio or TV or anywhere else I think you should change your diet! I’ve always appreciated irony and he’s a very talented broadcaster. I want to be careful, but he does Daniel O’Donnell very well! His finest though is Jose Mourinho.”
What does his wife, Sabina, make of her husband being taken off? It might be seen as disloyal if she starts giggling.
“God no, we’ve both been able to laugh at ourselves often enough,” he smiles. “It’s good to see political satire back on the agenda. David McSavage is another brilliant person.”
I didn’t see him at the Derry City/St. Patrick’s Athletic Cup Final.
“It was the finest game, and I had to miss it because I had something else on,” he rues. “I was President of Galway United and in addition to Terryland have been to Tallaght, Dalymount and Richmond Park. I’ve decided as president to not only attend international games, but league ones too. One of my favourite moments of the year was being in Poznan and meeting the Irish fans as I walked through the square. Those sporting events – and I include GAA and rugby of course – are part of what we are.”
Those OAPs are getting restless, so just one more question. Is there anything about the Presidency that’s surprised him?
“Yes, the hours!” he laughs. “I knew they’d be long, but I’m working later into the night than I’ve ever done and loving every minute!”