“I don’t think it’s helpful when an ambassador starts to make pointed comments about our President”.
That was the politically convenient verdict, yesterday morning, of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, on the weekend kerfuffle between President Higgins and the Ambassador from Israel, Dana Erlich. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know what it was about: The President, who is rather fond of shooting his mouth off, all but accused Israel pre-emptively of war crimes. The Ambassador, whose job it is to represent her country’s interests in Ireland, said that those comments from the President amounted to “misinformation”.
The nature of the Middle East being what it is, views on who was substantively correct in that exchange of rhetorical fire will vary. There will be those who defend the President to the end of time, either on a well informed basis or the tribal instinct that he’s one of us and Ambassador Erlich is not. Equally, there will be those who share the Ambassador’s frustration with the President’s persistent inability to control himself. As most readers know, I am in the latter camp.
But there’s a bigger issue than whether one agrees, or disagrees, with President Higgins various outbursts. That issue is simply that one cannot assert that Michael D. Higgins is within his rights to speak out, despite holding the Presidency, and at the same time assert that those who he criticises have no right to respond to him because he is Ireland’s President. But this is the position many of his defenders – including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the leader of what remains of the Labour Party – are adopting nevertheless.
This is not a position usually associated with a democratically elected post. It has much more in common with that of a religious figurehead. If one were to list societies in which the head of state could denounce whom he (almost always a “he) wishes, and where responding to those denunciations is considered an outrage, then one would struggle to find many democracies amongst them. The Ayatollah of Iran is one such figure. To some Catholics, Pope Francis is another. The dear and divinely ordained leader of North Korea is a third example.
The other thing that Higgins increasingly has in common with those figures is the fear of blaspheming his name that increasingly pervades the halls of Irish politics. Talk to an average Government backbencher in private, and they’ll use words to describe Higgins that one would hesitate to use in polite company. President O’Dalaigh – called a thundering disgrace (in reality, the words were “fucking disgrace” but could not be printed) got off lightly by comparison. But to be seen to criticise the President in public is, in the eyes of many of these same politicians, to draw the ire of his almost religiously devoted followers.
The parallels between the President and the Pope are not, of course, limited to just his conduct. They are two men of a similar age, and an almost identical worldview on global politics. Francis was raised in the revolutionary theology of Latin America, where he developed and sustains a deep suspicion of capitalism, wealth, and the west in general. Higgins is of that Irish generation for whom the likes of Che Guevara were heroes, and for whom the only real role for religion is in radicalising the masses against the power of big capital. Had either been born in the other’s country, it is not hard to imagine them having switched roles entirely.
The similarities between the two men do not end in their beliefs. Both have essentially become religious leaders in their old age. It is not hard, indeed it is blindingly obvious, to draw a parallel between Higgins role in modern Irish society and that of Archbishop McQuaid in the Ireland of the 1950s or 1960s. Like McQuaid, The President has no formal power, but his pronouncements carry all the weight of an archbishop’s crozier of yore, being designed to cow the media and the public into subordination on account of his words carrying something ephemeral called “moral authority”.
Like McQuaid, Higgins power comes with no responsibility. He can pronounce great and simplistic moral truths – like that our housing policy is bad – without ever having the duty to fix it himself. He can pronounce on international affairs without ever having to conduct diplomacy. He can denounce heretics, even as criticising him in return has been re-classed as a form of blasphemy.
The trouble is, that in behaving this way, he is destroying rather than wielding the moral authority of his office. For if the President is just another political commentator, then he has no claim to any better treatment from the press than somebody like George Hook or David McWilliams. His claims should be equally interrogated. He should be questioned and asked to justify his views like a common or garden talking head. If he wishes to drag himself down to the level of commentator on world affairs, then he is dragging the Presidency down with him.
The Windsor family, by contrast, decided in the early 1900s that being seen to be above politics was good for their position, because it made them look large by comparison. The President, a small man, is making his own office smaller by his actions, by drawing it into petty squabbles with the Israeli Ambassador.
The Israelis, after all, owe him no more deference than they owe anybody else. And neither, frankly, does any Irish citizen, given his conduct.