Private citizens NOT welcome on our President’s website
SABINA COYNE HIGGINS is wrong. Not slightly wrong, not half wrong or even mostly wrong. Sabina Coyne Higgins is totally wrong, as wrong as wrong can be. And this is why. Ms Coyne Higgins published on the official website of the President of Ireland a letter written by her, one that had already been published in The Irish Times. This letter expressed her views about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s savage and unprovoked war against Ukraine, on the official website of the President of Ireland. The fact that the President of Ireland is her loving husband Michael D Higgins has precisely nothing at all to do with anything.
In matters such as this it’s always helpful to step back to first principles. The most salient of these is that Ms Coyne Higgins is a private citizen of this State with no official capacity whatsoever. Just like me and you, my cousins in Mayo and my brother in Australia – all private citizens of Ireland.
And as private citizens, unelected and with no official role at all, we don’t have access – front door, back door or in the window – to any of the State’s websites, least of all the website of our first citizen, the President of Ireland. And neither should we.
THE controversy surrounding Ms Coyne Higgins’ letter has been muddied by the conflation of two completely different matters – the publishing of the letter on the President’s website on the one hand and, on the other, Ms Coyne Higgins’ unquestionable right to have and to express her own views on Putin’s war in Ukraine.
There’s nothing wrong with the latter, everything wrong with the former.
This unseemly and constitutionally problematic row over a letter written by the President’s missus has been coming for years, the result of the risible notion of an ‘expanded’ Presidency initiated by former Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, and also because of a puerile Americanisation of politics here that first began to reveal itself in the mid-Nineties.
In December 1995, in the lead-up to president Bill Clinton’s visit to Dublin, I recall how one idiot advising the thencoalition government told reporters that the ‘first ladies’ Hillary Clinton and Finola Bruton – Taoiseach John Bruton’s significant other – would be doing their own thing on the day Bill and the rest of us were gathering for a pint at Cassidy’s pub on Camden Street.
This signalled the start of a great pretence in Irish politics – that spouses, by virtue of that fact alone, have some kind of role to play in public affairs alongside their elected husbands or wives.
Personally, I’ve no great difficulty with that, but as the late US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia would have advised: write it down, put it before the Oireachtas, agree to legislate for it and have it signed into law. Until that happens, forget it.
Ms Coyne Higgins’ decision to publish her letter on the President of Ireland’s official website – for some inexplicable reason she has a dedicated section all to herself – crossed the line of political propriety for two reasons. One, the fact it was done at all and two, because of the content of the letter.
The most damning aspect of her letter is contained in paragraph two which reads: ‘Until the world persuades President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, the long haul of terrible war will go on.’
That sentence, on a fair and reasonable interpretation, places an equivalence between an evil, rapacious and murderous despot such as Putin, and Ukraine President Zelensky who is nothing if not a freedom fighter and defender of democratic principles. To have such a letter, containing such a paragraph on the official website of the President of Ireland, is manifestly wrong – and is in direct opposition to the firm position of the Irish Government – that Putin is the undiluted aggressor who must, willingly or under force of arms, withdraw from Ukraine. Ukrainians should never be asked or expected to sit down and talk things through with invaders who are murdering, raping and torturing them. That’s called appeasement and cowardice, moral capitulation and surrender to tyranny.
As the Winston Churchill character said in the 2017 film, Darkest Hour, at a time he was being advised to negotiate with Hitler: ‘When will the lesson be learned? When will the lesson be learned? How many more dictators must be wooed, appeased… before we learn? You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.’
Taoiseach Micheál Martin needs to have a chat with Michael D about the wife. He needs to tell the President that damage has been done and it must not be repeated. He needs to tell the President that his official website is for him alone and that no private citizen, such as Sabina Coyne Higgins, should be allowed onto it.
BUT, the Taoiseach won’t do that – like he failed to act when the President himself went offside with his ‘housing disaster’ statements in Naas in June. Because the Taoiseach knows there’s no votes in tackling the cuddly Michael D, hero of the arty classes and big city, lefty intellectuals. Principle is sidelined in the interests of Martin’s own political skin.
Ms Coyne Higgins identified herself the dire risks that present from her having anything to do with the President’s website. In her unconvincing attempt this week to shut down this latest controversy, she said she removed her letter from the website when she saw it was ‘being presented as not being from myself, but from the general President.ie website’. Precisely.
Which means only one thing; to avoid any further confusion, Sabina Coyne Higgins should remove herself entirely from the website and not be allowed to return.