Michael D could return to normal politics and give people chance to vote on his views

BERTIE Ahern pushed ostentatiously towards the ballot box so the whole Fianna Fáil parliamentary party could see that the leader was voting. Before he placed the ballot in the box Bertie showed Albert Reynolds that his name was written on it. Next to Albert was the MEP Brian Crowley, who wasn’t just an incredible vote-getter and talented banjo player but also a noted wit. He said, so everyone could hear: ‘that’s you f***ed so Albert’.

Albert was, indeed, f***ed. It is a legend of Fianna Fáil lore because many think it encapsulates Bertie Ahern’s cunning ability to knife a colleague while smiling in their face. However, the drama concealed a very serious manoeuvre. Ultimately Bertie was to endure a mixed legacy, but he delivered a peace process in Ireland the following year and recent tragic events in Israel and Ukraine reinforce how remarkable and unique this achievement was. In 1997 he was about to deliver peace between Britain and Ireland after 800 years of conflict and a 30-year savage campaign by Provisional IRA terrorists.

What he didn’t need was a loose cannon President. Mr Reynolds had played his own pivotal role in the peace process but he was not going to be a President that Ahern could control.

History shows that a then obscure academic, Mary McAleese, a Northern Catholic, with personal experience of the bloody, hateful conflict in that benighted province, was elected President that year. She would innately understand that an Irish President must never undermine his or her Government – or other Governments – in any instance, but particularly when it related to terrorism.

IWONDERED as our current President, Michael D Higgins, lobbed his verbal hand grenades as the Middle East quaked from terror, what would have happened if he, and not Mary McAleese, had been President back in 1997. He would not have been the President for those times, I fear.

The running commentary on the developing conflict in Israel made by President Higgins while he was in Rome on official business was bewildering.

About Israel and other stances taken by Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU, he said: ‘I don’t know where the source of those decisions was. I don’t know where the legitimation for it was, and I don’t know where the authority for it is, and I don’t think it is helpful.

‘I know that she wasn’t speaking for Ireland,’ said Higgins.

Initially this newspaper reported that Cabinet ministers were concerned that Ireland was an outlier by not joining the United States, Britain and the European Union in firmer public support for Israel, a sovereign democratic state, after it was attacked by proscribed terrorists Hamas. When the US and the EU amplified their calls for restraint by Israel, however, Ireland was then more in line with international democratic strategy – and the President wasn’t so far beyond a reasonable position, even if it was never really his place to have any position.

But when he then decided to declare the Al-Ahli Arab hospital explosion as an Israeli war crime in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, all tangential connection with acceptability simply disappears.

As could be seen quite quickly, the origin of the attack was in sharp dispute. There is still contrasting evidence from different sources – and with no independent investigation of the site, it is reckless in the extreme to vindicate one side over the other.

We also reported Cabinet ‘fury’ with President Higgins as he continued to criticise Israel. At the end of his week of statements, Michael D Higgins asked whether the Irish people ‘wanted a puppet or a President’. The rhetorical nature of the question would suggest that he thinks that what a President does is intervene in highly contentious international matters, without any clear mandate to do so.

Is there a more dangerous international matter for an unbriefed, unchecked politician to be making off-the-cuff remarks on? The tone of his comments were playing to a traditional leftist opposition to the state of Israel. No surprise, as before An Úachtaráin was elected, he was a traditional politician of the left. But that does not mean that everybody who voted for him in 2011 and 2018 agrees with his comments – or his right to make the comments.

PROPONENTS of the President’s right to opine say that there is nothing constitutionally stopping him from expressing opinions. But the convention that the President would not intervene in politics grew up because of the need for there to be clearly one locus of power – for the State to be able to speak with one voice.

And whatever about this need internally, the need for there to be one voice on the international stage is so obvious, as for it to be unarguable.

The President is paid well, given great privileges, a stately home and treated with due deference because he represents, in his person, the people from which all the rest of the democractic institutions of the state derive their legitimacy.

The appointment of a Government is actually a very serious, and necessary set of protocols, that protects the state from unknowable chaos. At the last election, Sinn Féin argued that because they had won the most votes in the election, they deserved to lead the government. Quite correctly this poppycock was dismissed, because it is only a majority of the Dáil that gives anybody that right – ceded to them formally by the President after it is demonstrated.

If that seems like purple prose, I point you to the current situation in the US, which since 2016 has been locked in an existential battle. Trumpism has rotted away the foundations of a country that was specifically founded to ward off despotic intentions. Such intentions to interfere with the peaceful handover of power are now being daily revealed in various trials. And yet Trump is still the most likely next Republican candidate.

I am not for one second suggesting any parallel between Trump and the venerable Michael D, a veteran politician who has a distinguished career dedicated to public service and erudite consideration of political problems.

But he has no crystal ball to foretell the future. The world of 1937, when the presidency was created is a long way from 2025 – when we are next scheduled to vote on the office. A new age of populism sweeps all around us.

And it is trite to suggest that the presidency doesn’t matter. The presidency does have the power to refuse to dissolve a Dáil. US Vice President Mike Pence crucially did not have an equivalent power on January 6, 2020.

Ultimately the individual, no matter how democratic, or fundamentally decent, should not matter. It is the office that matters, and it must be strong and robust constitutionally.

If not, it can be exposed by far less benign and decent figures than Michael D Higgins. In 2011, one of the candidates Higgins beat was the late Martin McGuinness, a former terrorist. A potential future Sinn Féin candidate is Gerry Adams. What does Gerry Adams as President say to unionists, who are constantly being urged to consider what a United Ireland could mean for them? Would Gerry Adams not have the right to opine on his long held Republican views – settle a few old scores? But it is unfair to focus solely on Sinn Féin. Hardright elements continue to forment discontent. And we have no way of knowing where the world will lead. Surely we must seek to uphold the institutions – and conventions – that have kept us, so far, out of the clutches of extremism.

As for the ‘puppet or President’ false dichotomy – while a great soundbite for a future Reeling in the Years, it lacks any basic logic. The President might not like the constraints that being a symbol of the people of Ireland necessarily imposes. But then he is always free, after his 14-year stint in the Áras, to return to the partisan electoral fray.

That would be against convention also, but at the very least, it would allow the electorate a fresh opportunity to give their view on his current position. It is likely he’d be popular. But he’s still wrong.