President Michael D. Higgins used the occasion of the Bloomsday Breakfast at Belvedere College, Dublin, on Sunday to refer to the dangers he believes are being presented to libraries by protests over the promotion of books which some have felt are inappropriate reading for the age groups at which they are aimed.
Without referring to the actual books concerned, President Higgins claimed that this was part of a campaign to institute a “reactionary and ignorant censorship.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that he was also referring to the calls by people on the left here to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, but no. His target was solely the “far right.”
Gript has reported on several instances where political representatives and organisations on the left were calling for teenagers to be prevented reading classics of modern English literature. Among them was Green Party candidate in the Longford electoral ward Catherine Joseph who wanted to have Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men removed from the Junior Certificate syllabus because they might impact on the mental well-being of African children. Joseph got 92 votes in the local elections.
President Higgins clearly regards himself as someone, in his current persona as President of the Republic of Ireland, who ought to be taken seriously on an intellectual level rather than simply as a figure head who mostly fulfils a ceremonial and symbolic position.
As such he deserves the courtesy of being treated on that level and having his opinions and statements which he delivers subjected to the same interrogation as they would be were he speaking in any other capacity. That applies to statements which he makes which must be contextualised not only with regard to the ongoing debate over the proposed “hate speech” legislation, but Higgins’ own consistency on censorship of ideas, and indeed of books themselves. His failure to comment on leftist calls for books to be banned, is one example.
In relation to “hate speech,” President Higgins, during a speech made at the National Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in January directly referred to how we “must be alert to the identification and confrontation of hate speech in any of its many guises.”
That must be taken in the context of the proposed legislation having come under renewed criticism and scrutiny at that time. Legislation, which if ultimately approved by the Oireachtas in its current form, will formally require signing by President Higgins. His remarks can obviously be interpreted as Higgins expressing his support for such laws.
Likewise, his speech yesterday should not be separated from renewed panic on the political liberal left over the election results and the success of some candidates who differ from the establishment on issues such as immigration. This is the basis of the current gas lighting and scare mongering over the ‘rise’ of the ‘far-right’, the alleged abuse of athletes, and the renewed concern over protests that have not, to my knowledge, been held in recent months.
As alluded to above, the President made no reference to leftist calls for book censorship and banning from school curriculums, and with good reason – for President Higgins has shown himself to be remarkably remiss in addressing this issue, not least in reference to the totalitarian socialist state of Cuba which he has visited in an official capacity and evidently greatly admires.
Ironically, in his Holocaust speech he referred to “rising political authoritarianism.” Cuba is one of the longest surviving and brutal authoritarian, indeed totalitarian, states on the planet. Yet, the architects and inheritors of that monstrous regime are among Higgins’ icons. Cuba is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to censorship of books, press, the internet, and indeed anything resembling the public discourse and exchange of ideas that are close to the heart of Michael D.
During a speech in Havana in February 2017, President Higgins spoke of a shared Irish and Cuban “passion for freedom” before inviting his audience to “reflect” upon “the meaning of that freedom.” Well, we know what freedom is not: Not being allowed to vote in free multi-party elections; nor practise one’s religion freely; not being able to read whatever books one chooses, nor to use the internet, and so on.
Higgins referred to none of these in Havana. Rather he pondered “Is the freedom we most value that from fear and oppression – freedom from the control of human minds and bodies? Or is freedom simply to be defined by the freedom of the market, by the right to unlimited consumption on the island of Cuba as on that of Ireland?”
Which seems to imply, does it not, that Cuba somehow possesses the first but must now protect it as its Communist Party oligarchs decide that embracing capitalism more openly is their best chance at staying in power? He went on to invite everyone to “meditate on the tragic consequences of the extreme version of repressive, and even oppressive, statism which developed in the twentieth century, that age of totalitarianism.”
Higgins was speaking as though Cuban totalitarianism was a thing of the past. It is not. And Gript, virtually uniquely in Ireland, has reported on how that totalitarian state still operates and on the opposition, including from leftist and gay activists who are among the San Isidro movement.
Surely if they are possessed of a sense of the ridiculousness there must have been worldly members of the Castro Gang in the President’s Havana audience who chortled at Higgins’ Foucauldian dexterities over the meaning of freedom and all that tommy rot. Chaps who were the inheritors and indeed in some cases the perpetrators of 70 years of mass murder, incarceration, torture, rape, and every other abomination brought to the world by totalitarian socialism.
Yet, our President seemingly has nothing to say of all of this. Nor of the calls for book banning and censorship in Ireland. Too fixated on people objecting to sexualised books for children, which Higgins might have you believe are on a literary and intellectual par with Joyce’s Ulysses.