Michael D Higgins is a President for his comrades, not the whole country
Our head of State won’t change his ways, but he should be called out for spouting such sentimental, socialist nonsense, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
‘Higgins imagines he’s the hero of a drama, when he’s the comic relief in an operetta’
IT’S not all bad news for President Michael D Higgins. He did receive some support from at least one other president for his simpering eulogy to dictator Fidel Castro. That was Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, who told RTE’s Sean O’Rourke last week that “those who would undermine or question the President’s commitment to human rights have a cheek”.
Not for the first time, Adams missed the point.
In fact, if you took Adams by the hand, led him over to the point, and then pointed at it, saying, “This is the point, Gerry”, he’d probably still manage to miss it.
It’s precisely because of President Higgins’s much-lauded concern for human rights that his comments were so reprehensible.
Previous moral rectitude no more mitigates that error than Castro gets a free pass from being a brutal dictator on the grounds that his regime had some nice schools and hospitals.
Though one wouldn’t know that to listen to the increasingly ludicrous excuses that have been made for both men in recent days.
Those defending Castro from criticism have basically spouted left-wing versions of the old argument that Mussolini may have been a bit naughty but at least he made the trains run on time.
Higgins’s comments likewise have been defended among the Irish commentariat with some very silly examples of false equivalence.
Colum Kenny, writing in the Irish Times, simply contented himself with contrasting President Higgins’s “dignified and balanced tribute” with the words of US President-elect Trump, who “made no effort to be balanced”.
Victoria White in the Irish Examiner played the same tune: “Before we lambaste Fidel we would do well to remember that Cubans may look across the Florida Straits at orange hair and wonder if democracy’s all it’s cracked up to be.”
Is this what we can expect for the next four years? That every justified criticism of another world leader will be shot down with a childish playground retort of “well, at least he isn’t Donald Trump”?
The choice is not between Higgins and Trump. It’s between a president who understands that his role is to speak on behalf of all the Irish people, and a president who thinks that his office is a mouthpiece for the sort of self-indulgent left-wing pieties which were his wont as a sociologist and career politician.
It is unthinkable that Higgins would have waxed so lyrically, or that he’d have been praised for being so, about any other leader whose regime had been responsible for the arrest of 9,125 political opponents in this year alone.
And don’t blame the US “blockade” of the island for all its ailments, as apologists for Castro have been doing all week.
There is no such thing. Cuba hasn’t been blockaded since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. US citizens and businesses are simply barred from visiting or trading with it — though many still do so anyway. Every other country on the planet is free to embrace Cuba.
To call that a blockade is the language of propaganda, not fact.
Any Irish person who thinks that the sort of restrictions on basic freedom detailed by Human Rights Watch are a fair price to pay in return for some minor advances in healthcare and education should be required to explain exactly what measures they’d be prepared to tolerate here in Ireland in return for similar benefits. Since this island has a population roughly half that of Cuba, would 4,000 arrests so far this year be acceptable?
How many artists would it be okay to send to prison for criticising the regime? How many Irish women could justifiably be rounded up on their way to Mass for belonging to a group of wives, mothers and daughters of political prisoners? Or is it only peasants far away who are expected to put up with being persecuted for exercising their right to free expression?
Some of the people who have been loudest in their defence of Castro, and President Higgins’s ingratiating comments about him, are the same sort of hysterical social justice warriors who reacted as if they were living in one large open-air concentration camp when a few Irish Water protesters were prosecuted. These lunatics think they’re being oppressed if anyone says so much as boo to them on Twitter and Facebook, while apparently being fine with a regime where it’s illegal to access the internet in your own home.
This is the constituency of socialist halfwits to which President Higgins appeals. They exaggerate their own supposed suffering at the hands of political opponents while dismissing the very real repression of others at the hands of left-wing dictators who make the right noises about freedom.
There’s not even any point at this stage in hoping or demanding that President Higgins change his ways. He’s not going to. Why would he? He’s enjoying himself too much. He’s finally got what he always wanted — the biggest platform in the country, from which he can spout the pseudo-intellectual inanities which impressed gullible social studies students for years.
The easily impressed in the Students’ Union bar may fall over in awe at his frequent name-dropping of recherche socialist thinkers such as Gramsci, but the rest of us just have to accept that the President has decided that he’s going to be the President for his like-minded comrades rather than for the country as a whole. As such, he will simply take criticism as confirmation that he must be on the side of the angels, otherwise why would all these frightful people be saying horrid things about him?
Higgins seems to imagine that he’s the hero of some great drama, when he’s just the comic relief in a minor operetta; though it’s an expensive joke, which will have cost the country well over €1m in salary in his first term alone.
His presence as our head of State is symptomatic of the age of silliness in which we now live. Presidents Higgins and Trump; UK foreign minister Boris Johnson; Ukip leader Nigel Farage; British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — the mavericks have risen to the top. They break the rules, they do things differently, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. All of them have, in their own way, clocked up remarkable achievements.
But they’re all faintly ludicrous, too. To varying extents, they’re also proponents of so-called “post-truth politics”, which appeals to emotion rather than reason and which prefers to peddle an appealing narrative over the messy reality.
Only two weeks ago, President Higgins was condemning this trend at a speech in honour of Philosophy Ireland. Days later, his official statement on Castro’s death was a masterclass in that same post-truth rhetoric he condemned.
The President preferred to mythologise “a giant among global leaders” rather than subject Castro’s legacy to the scrutiny which he would have demanded for any controversial figure not on the Left.
In that same speech, President Higgins lamented “the emergence of digital echo chambers in which people are not allowing themselves, their beliefs, or indeed their prejudice, to be challenged”.
He could be describing his own circle of sycophants. When have they ever submitted their own naive, socialist shibboleths to challenge? When have his supporters ever stepped outside their own echo chamber?