This article is from page 15 of the 2011-11-15 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 15 JPG
MICHAEL D Higgins has never been afraid to mince his words – never afraid to go against the establishment grain. Way back when and on his first day as President of Ireland.
Way back then he was in the frontline of 500 protesters who marched to the gates of Shannon Airport in 1984 in opposition to US president, Ronald Reagan’s state visit to Ireland.
Higgins, then a member of Seanad Éireann, mounted a spirited attack on what he termed “the mound of lies” which constituted the foreign policy of the Reagan administration, and applauded when fellow socialist, Jim Kemmy called for “a minute’s silence for all those who had suffered as a result of Reagan’s foreign policy” and that “Americans came here treating Ireland as though it was some sort of puppet State, a banana republic”.
Nearly 20 years later Higgins was one of eight Dáil deputies who marched on Shannon again – again rounding on American foreign policy as he used the politics of protest to get his point across.
“We have to support each other in making sure that the clear public opinion which is against war is heard by those who are staying silent,” he said when voicing his opposition to the war in Iraq, “their silence being complicit not only being the breaking of their own laws, but breaking the Irish constitution. Isn’t it extraor- dinary that they haven’t the courage to say what it is that Bertie Ahern agreed when he met George Bush,” he added.
So it was that Clare’s third president after Eamon de Valera and Dr Paddy Hillery used the occasion of his inaugural address to turn his voice of protest at the Ireland of recent years – the Celtic Tiger years that sparked economic meltdown, as he vowed to make his term of office a “presidency of transformation”.
“In more recent years, we saw the rise of a different kind of individualism – closer to an egotism based on purely matexrial considerations – that tended to value the worth of a person in terms of the accumulation of wealth rather then their fundamental dignity,” he said.
“That was our loss, the source in part, of our present difficulties. Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.
“During my campaign for the Presidency, I encountered that pain particularly among the most vulnerable of our people. However, I also recognise the will of all of our people to move beyond anger, frustration or cynicism and to draw on our shared strengths. To close the chapter on that which has failed, that which was not the best version of ourselves as a people, and open a new chapter based on a different version of our Irishness – will require a transition in our political thinking, in our view of the public world, in our institutions, and, most difficult of all, in our consciousness.
“In making that transformation, it is necessary to move past the assumptions which have failed us and to work together for such a different set of values as will enable us to build a sustainable social economy and a society which is profoundly ethical and inclusive. A society and a state which will restore trust and confidence at home and act as a worthy symbol of Irishness abroad, inviting relationships of respect and co-operation across the world,” he added.