We don’t need a president spouting populist rhetoric
IN HIS speech from the White House, President Biden made his case for the US spending billions on military aid to Israel. I wonder what President Michael D Higgins thinks about that? Given that he has been practically providing a running commentary on the Middle East crisis since it began, we may be about to find out.
I voted for Michael D Higgins in 2011 because he was head and shoulders above the rest of them. I knew where he stood ideologically and approved of much of it, but I didn’t for a second expect that, as President, he’d behave like Clare Daly, parroting old-style leftist values on the world stage.
He has attacked EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for her unequivocal support for Israel and for overstepping her remit. Takes one to know one, I suppose. In Rome, he once again trod on political toes, demanding that the bombing of the hospital in Gaza be investigated as a war crime.
His Middle East pronouncements come after his recent warning about how Ireland was drifting away from traditional neutrality towards membership of Nato. On the home front, he has promoted a dystopian view of society, blaming it on neoliberal economics and the destruction of the natural environment.
THE President is supposed to be apolitical; it is a unifying role as the nation’s figurehead, not as recruiting officer for the office-holder’s agenda, and an outdated one at that. If Michael D had specialist knowledge of the Middle East or had lived there for a while or spoke the languages, there would be some justification for his breaching the convention that Presidents maintain a lofty distance from the political or foreign policy fray. As it stands, he’s no more qualified to speak out than any other erudite scholar or former politician.
Perhaps the country’s identification with the Palestinian cause, stemming from our own historical experience as underdogs to a colonial power, emboldens him to speak so freely. But he assumes a lot.
The barbarism of Hamas’s
surprise attack on Israeli citizens must have given many Irish people reason to pause and question our empathy for Palestinians. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If the dispossessed and abandoned people of the West Bank and Gaza have long pulled at our heart strings, then the sight of a sobbing young mother toting her infant in one arm, her toddler in the other as they were carted off, haunts our sleep.
Hamas are butchers. Like the Israeli army, they kill civilians, defenceless women and children and the elderly if they are in their way.
On top of the 1,400 Israelis they massacred, Hamas have more than 200 hostages. Like the trapped people of Gaza, they will be used as human shields against Israeli ground attack, just one more element
of the humanitarian catastrophe facing the region where babies are dying for lack of clean water and pregnant women have no pre- or post-natal care.
MICHAEL D believes he has right on his side when it comes to this tragic conflict, but he also knows the dangers of wading into public debates. By his dubious behaviour, he is creating a precedent for his successors to be similarly generous with their opinions, and while that might be tolerable if their heart is in the right place, as his is, it would a travesty of everything the presidency is designed to represent if not.
We don’t need a Trumpian president in the Phoenix Park, spouting populist rhetoric, whipping up prejudices under the guise of speaking for ordinary folk and poisoning the public discourse.
In the 2018 presidential election, Peter Casey was a leading candidate, the favourite of those who feel excluded from the so called ‘establishment’ and approved of his anti-Traveller rhetoric.
Who will be the populist candidate next time? It would be ironic indeed if instead of turning the dial to old-school socialism, Michael D’s greatest legacy was opening the doors of Áras an Uachtaráin to its reverse.
Michael D believes he has right on his side in this conflict