“Why couldn’t he focus on the Holocaust for just one day?” a WhatsApp message from a friend, a UK-based journalist, read on Tuesday. Others on the group chat agreed with the tenor of the question. I realised how weary I had grown of trying to explain President Michael D Higgins’s words and proclivities to curious but incredulous English people. The first time I remember doing so is when he wrote an article in the Guardian in 2021, on the centenary of partition, in which he lectured Britain about its imperial past. Hosting a letter about brokering peace with Russia, written by his wife, on his presidential website provoked some raised eyebrows too.
But it was Holocaust Memorial Day that turbocharged the entire disposition. What were once well-meaning questions about the President turned sour and accusatory. What was he thinking showing up when he had been asked by several in Ireland’s Jewish community not to? How could he use the podium to talk about the “rubble of Gaza”, as though he couldn’t bear to make the event about anything other than Palestine?
Did he really speak of “attempted genocide”, in reference to the Holocaust but presumably invoking Gaza on a day to remember the industrial slaughter of six million Jews? Was a peacefully protesting Jewish woman just forcibly ejected from a Holocaust remembrance event?
These are the questions – delivered with open-mouthed disbelief – in London right now. Perhaps Higgins would welcome them, see them as proof of his ethical stature, evidence that Ireland is a morally developed place compared to the base imperial Brits. Everyone is entitled to their own self-mythologising. But here the image of an intellectually vain man prevails; his “false equivalence” provokes particular ire.
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And don’t take it from me. The Times of London’s leader article on Tuesday suggests that Ireland is need of a president of “imagination, dignity and sensitivity” to cope with the demands of the world in 2025. Higgins, so the editorial indirectly suggests, stands in stark contrast to these qualities. Instead, he is described as lecturing, clumsy and posturing. The view from some in London is that Higgins is a man shouting into the sea as the world changes around him. (Incidentally, The Times suggests these qualities are best embodied by King Charles ... )
But the problem isn’t really Higgins himself. He will hand over the office (hopefully to someone more temperate) soon. The problem, instead, is that he is expending the goodwill that was once held in huge reserves for Ireland. Not because he is standing up for Palestine – as he would like to believe – but because the moral hectoring from Ireland’s peacenik class grates in the UK and the rest of Europe as they face complex realities about war and defence. For a country that likes to think of itself as more secular than ever, piety is in no short supply.
All of it is a great shame because it gives license to some in Britain to go on the offensive, making sweeping generalisations about not just Higgins, but Ireland’s economic strategy and global position, its future under the spectre of Donald Trump and its entire national character. Criticism that should be limited entirely to President is spilling over the margins, resulting in a rather vituperative atmosphere.
Headlines about Ireland’s Holocaust Memorial Day ‘embarrassment’ do not encourage observers to approach the country with a great store of charity
The last time I sensed such dislike and haughtiness to Ireland was at the very height of the Brexit years, when Leo Varadkar was cast as an ultimate villain and the country was dismissed as a naive patsy of the evil Brussels establishment. Goodwill returned after those tense years, but it was not guaranteed to stick around.
For all its genuine friendliness to the Irish state, some of the British establishment still hasn’t managed to shake its stereotypical thinking. Ireland occupies a place in their mind of the small, poor and dependent economy, no matter that anyone can technically witness its largesse.
And so a totally incoherent view has emerged: Ireland got rich by accident (how else could the oik potato farmers be better off than us?) but also by nefarious means (cash-grabbing tax-haven, EU-impoverishing harpies). No one has really faced the reality that Ireland – just like in the Brexit years – cannot really be a useful fool and malign actor at the same time. But such is the stereotype.
While no one serious is changing their views on Ireland’s tax policy because of the President’s stance on Palestine, rhetoric has coarsened and bad-faith thinking has returned to the fore. Headlines about Ireland’s Holocaust Memorial Day “embarrassment” do not encourage observers to approach the country with a great store of charity. Ireland’s international and domestic successes recede into the background while it sullies its reputation so completely needlessly. It allows scepticism to turn to cynicism.
There are plenty of malign critics of Ireland – some of whom wield real influence – and events like this hand them a loaded gun, a reason to prattle off their prejudices, to speak with a sharp tongue about the whole place, not just its head of state. And for what? Just so Michael D Higgins can morally posture into the abyss?
