WHO HAS BEEN SPYING ON THE PRESIDENT?

It seems that unnamed ministers have been compiling reports on Michael D Higgins, writes Gene Kerrigan

HEADS up. Be careful who you speak to, files are being opened and notes are being taken.

Let me draw your attention first to the comments of our Taoiseach, Mr Varadkar, on some of the recipients of the Covid emergency payments.

And then let us note that the whisper merchants who manipulate public perception are currently targeting our President, Mr Higgins.

The manoeuvres that will decide who pays the Covid bill are under way. Some of those with the most to gain from a stable society will — as usual — seek to pay as little as they can. The mugs will be stuck with a bill to be paid in austerity.

Faced with the Covid health emergency, the Government — to its credit — heeded the advice of the World Health Organisation and Nphet, the panel of experts in place to guide us through such emergencies.

It needed the bulk of the population to stay at home, and to engage in protective behaviour. Otherwise, we’d have had much larger numbers of people seriously ill or dead.

The shaky public health system might have collapsed, and the economy would have been damaged to a far, far greater extent than it has been.

The lockdown meant people lost their income.

The normal social insurance system couldn’t handle the job — it would have taken too long and been an administrative nightmare.

So, emergency measures were necessary. That resulted in the Covid €350 payment scheme and income supports.

Without such payments, the lockdown would have met quick, devastating rejection — and we would have been in deep trouble.

Now, although the crisis is far from over, politicians are deciding how the bill will be paid.

Their model for this is what happened after the 2008 economic collapse. The State took over the private debts that the bankers and investors created, and the people endured a decade of austerity.

Some economists argued against this. When private sector investment is withheld, they said, the State needs to stimulate demand, not to help it contract.

But the financial markets demanded that public spending be slashed. The State’s pet economists nodded obligingly.

Politically, this was underwritten by Fianna Fail and the Greens.

Fine Gael and Labour denounced the austerity as “obscene”. They won a landslide general election in 2011 — and then proceeded to implement precisely the same austerity measures, until they were in turn kicked out in 2016.

The decade of austerity brought terrible consequences for many. It also led to a substantial increase in the number of millionaires, as those who benefit most thrived. Austerity delayed economic recovery, but protected the structural inequalities.

And, here we go again. Again the economics of slash and burn will delay recovery, but will protect those with most to gain.

So, we must be convinced to accept another period of belt-tightening for the many, while the few protect their fortunes.

Last week, Mr Varadkar had a cosy chat on Newstalk FM. Mr Varadkar needs no encouragement to badmouth those who need social insurance payments. His career high was launching an expensive campaign against the problem of “benefit cheats”, a problem which his own department knew did not exist. It was a campaign which the department’s top official later publicly deemed “a mistake”.

Such background, though relevant, was of no interest to the Newstalk interviewer. He said people “will be kind of horrified at the prospect of forking out tens of millions of euro every week”.

And “maybe to people who don’t need the money, and who are making a lot more out of this payment”.

Mr Varadkar might have said it’s a scandal that the lowest income the Government could get away with paying exceeds the lousy wages that many get for a week’s work. Instead, he agreed, saying: “That’s true.”

He promised: “We will need to do a bit of enforcement around that... we’re working on that now.”

The crisis has made plain a scandal of ruthless employers short-changing workers. For Mr Varadkar, the only question is how quickly he can force people back on to those lousy wages.

Meanwhile, over at The Irish Times the investigative talents of the country’s bestdressed bloodhounds had uncovered a scoop.

“A report,” the paper said, “has been circulated among senior officials and ministers in Dublin” about an interview that Michael D Higgins gave to an Italian newspaper, Il Manifesto.

“His views,” the paper revealed, “are said to have raised some eyebrows.”

Wow, well done — hell of a story.

I’ve read a translation of the interview. It’s quite short — just four questions. It’s conducted in the language of sociology — quite hard to decipher some of it, replete as it is with obscure references.

Mr Higgins says the reaction to the Covid crisis will affect the future of the EU. He refers to an article he wrote, which says “the price paid for austerity is too high and it cannot come back a second time”.

The questioner refers to the Covid crisis in Italy, and the Cuban doctors who came to help out. Mr Higgins thinks that was a good thing. He says the Irish approach to fighting Covid seems to be paying off.

He’s then asked, as a sociologist, for the lessons of the crisis. Finally, he’s asked about distance-learning in universities, and he favours the human interaction between teacher and pupil.

“Raised some eyebrows”, hmmmm?

Il Manifesto isa communist magazine, with no party affiliation. It has a circulation in Italy of about 10,000 and attracted the support of the likes of the late Umberto Eco. So far, so humdrum.

Some might say, fair play to Mr Higgins for bothering to reply to a request for a brief interview with an obscure foreign publication.

Extraordinarily, according to The Irish

Times, this short interview has provoked “senior officials and ministers” to compile some sort of “report”. And to leak its views to The Irish Times.

Weirdly, the newspaper conceals the identity of those who’ve been compiling a “report” on the President’s activities.

This, surely, is the real scoop — not the fact that Mr Higgins has well-known views on a number of issues.

The newspaper doesn’t say how many ministers are involved, or who the “senior officials” are.

What does the coy phrase “his views are said to have raised some eyebrows” mean?

Said by who? And to whom? Why aren’t we told?

Precisely how high did those eyebrows go?

Who else have these people been compiling “reports” on? On ministers, TDs, journalists, activists?

Do they have anything they’d like to tell us about the Greens, or the Social Democrats? Have the “ministers” got “reports” on their Fianna Fail friends?

I doubt if the “senior officials” and ministers have exercised their eyebrows over the President’s views on distance-learning. More likely they worry that anyone of Mr Higgins’s standing has a view on how their austerity plans might affect the people.

So, the whisper goes out — there’s a “report”. He spoke to communists, y’know. The eyebrows, the eyebrows ...

People in high places have plans for us. They meet, discuss, compile reports — and, well ... we’re not entirely sure what else they’re up to.

‘Who else have these nosey people been compiling reports on?’