DEPARTING THE DAIL:VETERAN POLITICIAN Michael D Higgins has no doubts about the main failings of the Irish political system.
The Labour Party president and spokesman for foreign affairs highlights the growth of anti-intellectualism; an increasing shallowness in values and debate; and the failure to distinguish between political views and personalities.
The poet and former university lecturer is equally adamant about global weaknesses. “The greatest human failure of the 20th century is the inability of international global institutions to control speculative capital. And it is bringing misery all around the world.”
“Even the idealism associated with the European project – building a Europe that would never be at war again – is in danger from the speculative forces attacking the euro zone. The EU is in danger of collapsing back to being an economic zone,” he says.
However, his main focus is the presidency. A TD for Galway West for 24 of the last 29 years, he will stand down at the election to seek his party’s nomination for the presidential election in November.
The Labour Party will mark its centenary in 2012, 2013 is the 100th anniversary of the workers’ lock-out, and then it will be the 1916 centenary. “I hold the view that we have never seriously created a genuine republic.”
His father and two uncles were on opposite sides during the Civil War. “What happened to their vision of what the Republic they fought for would be like?”
His time in the Oireachtas included five years as a senator from 1982 and an earlier four-year stint in the 1970s. He believes politicians have changed since then. “Younger TDs are more straight-forwardly ambitious. Of course there is as much variation among the younger members as older TDs. And there is no assuming that youth means more radical. Some of the older TDs are far more radical.”
He adds: “I don’t think you will see people spending as many decades as I did as public representatives, particularly in the two larger parties. They have decided to give it so many years and if they are not appointed a minister or minister of state within a certain time they are not going to hang around.”
Now 69, he remembers that “I was 28 when I started, 27 when I started campaigning on PR [proportional representation] to change the voting system. I’d been president of the students’ union in 1965.”
He also remarks on the change “in the way politics is delivered”. There is “a very interesting cultural feature of modern Ireland. A lot of people start by saying ‘I’m not going to delay you long’, as if you’re not interested in what they have to say, they don’t have anything interesting to say or the people they are addressing are so important they can’t delay them in eating, drinking or thinking. It’s a confession of shallowness. You needn’t be long-winded if you have something to say,” says the man noted for his oratory.
“There has been a huge technological change as well. When I started members didn’t have support staff. Contrary to the suggestion that this simply supports clientelism, I don’t agree. My staff do a lot of research. I’m a regular speaker in the Dáil and I would do a lot of speaking on human rights and overseas development.”
He reserves his most withering criticism for the lack of substance in debate. “My own training was in political economy but that was reduced to econometrics, then economics and now it’s all about how the market will respond. It’s a dictatorship of assumptions.”
He recalls a “senior Fianna Fáil TD who had no time for philosophies or ologies” and that Bertie Ahern “never particularly liked the doctors in the Labour Party”.
The late Fine Gael TD John Kelly is remembered affectionately. “He was right-wing but intellectually very strong.
“We were very different politically but I know the distinction between politicians’ political views and their personalities.”
“Assertion and counter-assertion doesn’t constitute a rich political engagement. The fact of the matter is we’ve paid a very heavy price for anti-intellectualism in Irish political discourse generally . . . If politics is to mean anything it should be an engagement about ideas.”
Instead “people are running with the crowd, to limit this and abolish that. This is done in a festival of cliches. People really spend no time considering what it is politicians do or should do.”
He lost his Dáil seat in the 1982 election during the referendum debate on abortion. “I temporarily lost my battle with fundamentalism,” he says.
The highs included winning the seat, removing the section 31 broadcasting ban while minister for arts and establishing the Irish language channel, now TG4.
Looking to the future, he says “we all want a society that is healthier and fairer” after “a period of pernicious, radical individualism”.