Grubby truth about our ‘poet President’
MICHAEL D Higgins is unlikely to disappoint the political parties that fixed it for him to win the presidential election next Friday. The odds on his victory are overwhelming – but the political stunts that secured him a second term will indelibly stain his saintly reputation.
Since his first term began seven years ago, Michael D has become a millionaire. A rich man in the Áras is unremarkable but that is not how Michael D sees himself – or how he wants the world to see him. We recently learned that our ‘socialist’ President bought a house in 2013, his third property, and is now earning €2,000 a month in rent. That would be on top of his €250,000 salary and his €19,000 NUI Galway pension.
His recent scramble to reclaim street cred as a socialist mystic would be laughable if it didn’t betray a latent hypocrisy.
And Candidate Higgins’ double standards screamed last week when he warned the political parties supporting him not to use his image in advertising. He is head of State and must respect the partypolitical independence of that office, said his spokesman.
That’s a little rich considering both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil threw their money and influence behind his re-election campaign.
Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil colluded in what is essentially a rigged election that belittles the Office of the President and is an affront to voters and democracy.
From now on, President Higgins should be seen as what he is: an ambitious career politician who employed the same tradecraft as his peers to get elected. To give him an edge he has ducked debates to maintain an incumbent’s advantage, as if that is the natural order and ethical.
HE HAS chosen not to explain his expenses until after polling, and queries about other huge costs such as taking a jet to Belfast are being met with an air of injured innocence. His supporters treat queries about spending in the Áras as a vulgar intrusion into his privacy, yet wag fingers at other candidates when questions arise about their funding or behaviour: they were sniffy about Joan Freeman’s €120,000 loan and appalled by Peter Casey’s populism.
But the more the campaign rolled on, the more the public saw Michael D as another jobbing politician doing whatever has to be done to get re-elected.
His second term comes at enormous cost to the self-styled image he has carefully cultivated over nearly 50 years in public life. He sees himself as an aesthete poet sacrificing personal and professional gain rather than surrendering the socialist principles that he holds sacred.
He could also be a secular mystic who shunned the wily and worldly ways of political tradesmen and orated in an indecipherable stream of consciousness that often defied grammar. What he said didn’t matter nearly as much as the righteous indignation he used to deliver a diatribe that always finished with a crescendo. He wore his socialism loud and proud while lionising leaders in small, hot Spanish-speaking countries.
He has since fallen out with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, now vice-president, but accompanied him on an Irish visit in 1989. He also praised two tyrants, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
AS A TD he formed a close friendship with then-senator Shane Ross on visits to Latin America and he enjoyed regular chats with Charles Haughey when Haughey was Taoiseach. witty conversationalist with a mischievous sense of humour and social drinker, he was very popular among all of the politicians in Leinster House, but he yearned to be popular with young people.
As a columnist in Hot Press he became a close friend of the editor, Niall Stokes, and when he became arts minister he appointed Stokes to State boards. He also dispensed funding and patronage on his constituency in the classic ‘all politics is local’ tradition.
It is an unlikely back-story for a presidential candidate but it has served him well – personally and professionally. And now he is on the cusp of another seven years as head of state.
HECKLERS might have urged former minister Denis Naughten and broadband billionaire David McCourt to ‘get a room’ when details of their secret meetings were revealed. Further gettogethers have emerged since I stopped counting at eight, but Denis and David will have to make all of the details in their dating diary public in the coming weeks.