Coalition is privately furious at Higgins over ‘reckless’ remarks on the Middle East crisis
WHILE publicly the Government is unwilling to criticise President Michael D Higgins, privately there was widespread condemnation across the Coalition this week of statements he has made on the deepening conflict in the Middle East.
There is a reluctance to publicly rebuke Mr Higgins for fear of sparking a distracting political battle with a popular politician coming to the end of his career.
However, ministers and other senior Coalition figures were privately seething at his latest intervention, saying his statements on Israel and Gaza were ‘reckless’, ‘incendiary’ and ‘politically illiterate’.
‘Problem is when he says this stuff on an international stage’
Mr Higgins has steadily tried to change the perception that the President does not get involved in political controversies. While some of his comments on domestic matters such as housing have usually resulted in shrugged shoulders from the Government, there was significant unease behind the scenes at his intervention on the febrile situation in the Middle East.
Asked about Mr Higgins’s comments this week, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar insisted he has ‘a very good relationship with the President,’ adding: ‘I’m not going to criticise him in any way.’
However, the MoS has learned there was significant disquiet within Cabinet over the President’s comments made while on Government business in Rome, where he met with Pope Francis.
Concern within Government was exacerbated by internal dissent over Ireland’s lukewarm support for Israel, which one minister said ‘made us seem an outlier’.
The Cabinet source told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘What does it make us look like when our President is out there talking like a student crackpot? What he said was embarrassing
and awful, and completely detached from the discussions we were having in Government about our appropriate reaction.’
Another minister said: ‘He is coming to the end of his term and at his age we don’t hear too much from him these days. There’s nothing in it for us to go attacking him. He is popular in a nutty professor kind of way, yes, but counterintuitively, I don’t think people here take much notice of him.
‘The problem is when he starts saying this stuff on an international stage. It’s also incoherent, a lot of what he says. And if you actually listen and analyse it, it doesn’t add
up. This is one of the most combustible situations imaginable.’
On Monday, President Higgins strongly criticised the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, over comments she made following the brutal Hamas massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis. Ms von der Leyen said: ‘How Israel responds will show that it is a democracy’.
President Higgins said she ‘wasn’t speaking for Ireland’, adding: ‘What one is seeing in this is a thoughtless and even reckless set of actions and I don’t think it’s helpful.’
Mr Higgins said it was ‘one thing’ to breach international law, ‘but to
actually announce in advance that you’re going to break international law, and that you announce it again and again, and that you do so on an innocent population’ reduces international law ‘to tatters’.
At the World Food Summit, the President said the world was ‘revulsed’ by the killing of young people at a concert by Hamas.
He later called for the devastating explosion at a hospital in Gaza, which killed hundreds of innocents to be investigated ‘as a war crime’, despite the US backing of Israel’s claim the rocket was fired by Palestinian faction Islamic Jihad.