Michael D

Our president is a political hurler on the ditch, writes Donal Lynch

In the electoral Wacky Races that was the last presidential election, nobody could blame us for opting for Michael D. He was a safe pair of hands, the only one who didn’t look like he would be some Trump-level mistake. And he outspent all the others, who, in any case, looked like they were running for a bet. Predictably, he won by a landslide, and we patted ourselves on the back with the kind of national smugness which has become our speciality in the era of Brexit.

Clever us. And clever Michael D. Nobody seemed to mind that he’d previously sworn he’d only serve the one term. We were swept up in self-congratulation. In fact, had it been an option, we might have chosen to make Michael D our monarch. He already speaks a little like the

Queen — that regally limited aperture, slightly nasal intonation and facility with archaic quotes — so why not let him reign like her?

Perhaps because 14 years will be quite long enough to be listening to a politician who has the unique luxury of naming problems without naming solutions. Michael D once quoted Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who said: “A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart”. It’s a pity his own speechwriters don’t adhere to these virtues.

His speeches are kind of like impressionistic essays that weave in and out of logic, philosophy and literature, without ever coming to what one might call a point. Here’s a typically waffly paragraph from one of them: “It would be foolish to assume that the brand of economic reasoning that currently dominates both academic and policy thinking is non-ideological. Here, I am making reference, in particular, to a range of ideas and theories that relate to the neo-liberal doctrine, and I do so in conscious knowledge of the difference between that doctrine and both classical and neo-classical theory.” Can you feel your beanbag dancing yet?

He is the ultimate political hurler on the ditch. He was “appalled’ by the treatment of Greece during the financial crisis, but had no suggestion as to how they might have been treated differently. Last year, he said that austerity “asked the impossible” of European citizens, but of course he had no ideas as to how else we might otherwise get economic recovery going — as we have done. He signed off on the water charges without consulting the Council of State on whether to put the bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality. While Labour, the party of which he was a member until his election as president, suffered decimation at the polls, he sailed serenely above the fray, seemingly above politics itself.

Perhaps that’s because he is, for some (himself included), the ‘poet president’. Except, have you ever read any of his poetry? In When Will My

Time Come, he writes: “...Decades ago I was never able/To get excited/About filling the lungs with ozone/On Salthill Prom.../ ...when words were required/To intervene at the opening of Art Exhibitions/It was not the same.”

The Guardian, which probably agrees with Michael D on almost every issue, kindly called this “laboured”, but it might be more accurate to say that the president is a poet in the same way Hitler was an artist.

There has always been quite a whiff of Champagne socialist off the president. Through most of the his time in office, he has repeatedly criticised capitalism as an economic system — while pulling in almost quarter-of-a-million in salary, plus healthy expenses. It seems extraordinary that he’s not a little more cognisant of the capitalistic cogs that turn the wheels of his cushty State numbers.

Perhaps, in the end, with Michael D, we do have to go back to the alternatives, however. He saved us looking too closely at the other chancers. And in that, at least, he has done the State some service.