We are not allies, I can safely say, President Michael D Higgins and I, on most issues. I have written previously about his tendency to use the Presidential office (which costs the taxpayer between €4 and €5 million a year, by the way) as his own personal soap box.
However, it seems to me that the extent and spread of the hostile reaction to Higgins’s latest take on geo-politics seems to be not just over the top, but also a little choreographed.
At the weekend, the President attended the Young Scientists & Technology Exhibition in the RDS where he made the sort of remarks which are now fairly commonplace for the man, who, no doubt, as his second term barrels towards an end, couldn’t care less about his critics. He is, of course, missing the point, and this can’t be said enough. The office of President is meant to be above politics, and is more about engaging in diplomacy than acting as if he is speaking for the country on vitally important issues, because he’s not.
If Higgins wanted to stick his oar into geo-politics, or transgenderism in schools, or making “incorrect and far-fetched” statements about the massacre of Christians in Nigeria, to give just three examples, then he should have kept going as a TD and sought to be Taoiseach or Minister for Foreign Affairs. But he didn’t – and while I mostly agree with him, for example, on the bombing of Gaza, and thoroughly disagree with him on other issues, such as abortion – I believe that the authority that is mistakenly perceived he has regarding many of his pronouncements undermines the role of the Presidency, both at home and one the world stage.
Today, he is being attacked because of what he said at the Young Scientists & Technology Exhibition, and the reaction could be categorised as fairly hostile.
Higgins said that science ‘without a moral compass’ could lead to a build-up of weaponry and “rhetoric that calls for war as a state of mind”. He warned against science becoming “a tool for the acquisition of unaccountable power and influence in a manner that threatens democracy itself”.
The world faced “multiple interlocking challenges and indeed crises, existential in nature itself – rising poverty, deepening inequality and global hunger, catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss”, he said. Added to this was “the ongoing promulgation of war and an encouraged perception of the impotence of diplomacy”.
According to the Irish Times, he added that the challenges facing the world included “the ongoing promulgation of war and an encouraged perception of the impotence of diplomacy”.
“At present, it is being employed to generate ever more sophisticated weapons and instruments of death and destruction used to generate fear for populations while supporting the insatiable drive of the military-industrial complexes for profits,” he said.
Military expenditure globally had increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023 to $2.44 trillion, the highest ever recorded; “at the same time, the number of people affected by hunger has risen by 200 million globally”.
“It is important that we respond to this use of science and a rhetoric that calls for war as a state of mind, including the recent appalling comments from Nato calling for ever more armaments spending to be achieved,” Mr Higgins said.
“This may, we were told, cause pain in the present so as to achieve security in the future, in the words of the secretary general of Nato Mr [Mark] Rutte. He said we should have the mentality of war even at the expense of investing in essentials – in education, social protection and health.”
The world had the capacity to eliminate extreme global poverty, he said, but “preparing for war has driven it off the agenda. As I wrote this speech, six infants under four weeks old have died of hypothermia in their tents in Gaza. Having been displaced three times, the grieving father of twins said, ‘There were eight of us, and we had only four blankets.’”
It is somewhat facile, obviously, to suggest that the complex issue of global hunger – where war, drought, state-failure, ongoing local conflicts, and other factors are enormous and often seemingly intractable causes – can be solved by a straight swap with defence expenditure. That’s a simplistic view of the world.
In the same vein, as long as there are threats to national security, countries will spend money on defence, although clearly many are also pumping billions into warfare. But it was Higgins’s comment on NATO that seemed to draw the most criticism.
“Disgusting comments from Ireland’s president, detached from reality,” tweeted Shashank Joshi, Defence editor at the Economist.
And he was joined by Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov, who said:
“Ireland, whose safety is de-facto guaranteed by NATO, and which not only rides for free but also grandstands lecturing others who, unlike her, don’t have the luxury of being an island off an island off the safe side of Europe and today face an existential threat.!”
And by John O’Brennan, the Professor of European Politics, Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration (a position basically set up by the European Commission to advocate for its interests) who said that the views of Trofimov were “a very common reaction to the President’s comments across Europe today” – adding that “Ireland is an increasing outlier in Europe” and that it was time “to grow up and take some responsibility for the security of our continent”.
I’m not sure he’s right there. Polls typically show that support for joining NATO in Ireland is pretty low, though it rose after the invasion of Ukraine. What O’Brennan likely really means is that the angry reaction is from the European establishment who are annoyed with Higgins but who, in some cases at least, heavily invested in the business of warfare.
It’s easy to be gung-ho about facing down Russia and increasing spending on war and all its many components when its not your son dying on the battlefield. The real cost of war is in human lives, and its not simplistic or naïve to acknowledge that – as Donald Trump did recently when he talked about the “staggering” “numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place” due to the war in Ukraine.
Amongst those criticising Higgins was the former President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who slammed what he saw as our “privileged geography” and the appropriateness of the Irish president’s comments.
It’s easy to see where Ilves is coming from – Estonia was previously occupied by Russia for decades and suffered appalling oppression under the jackboot of Moscow. However, the reference to Ireland’s supposed privileged geography is a poor choice of words given the long and brutal occupation of this island by our nearest neighbour
Two things can be true simultaneously: that the world seems increasingly full of tensions, and that it does not behove a small country like Ireland to get involved in most conflicts.
But if we are not involved, then why should we speak out against Israel, for example, regarding the horrendous bombing of civilians in Gaza? A raft of commentary, both here and abroad, has argued in recent times that such actions damage Ireland, given Israel’s powerful allies and our particular reliance on U.S. multinationals for the corporation tax revenues that make our profligate spending possible.
Why, as the old saying goes, is small and irrelevant Ireland poking the bear? Is that the stance our critics believe we should adopt?
What’s curious about this argument is that when it was used in the lead-up to Russia invasion of Ukraine, it was decried as a coward’s charter, an inexcusable dereliction of the West’s duty to protect democracy. Those who argued that certain Western powers seemed to be poking the original bear – the mighty Russian state – were told that it would be unthinkable to allow Moscow to simply use its might against a smaller country, whatever the consequences.
The reality of geopolitics didn’t seem to matter much then: instead the West poured hundreds of billions into a war that now seems might be settled on terms that might have been agreed more than two years ago. Pointing out that the three-year war seems to have mostly advantaged the military industrial complex doesn’t make one a ‘shill for Russia’ except in the eyes of propagandists, in my view.
In the same vein, one can agree with Israel’s right to exist and defend itself without supporting their appalling attacks on civilians. Those accusing anyone holding a more nuanced view of naivety and stupidity seem to simply want us to sign up to a bully’s charter, where we cannot speak out against atrocities for fear of falling foul of rich and powerful states. But isn’t that exactly why many of the atrocities that have happened in the world came about? Didn’t holocausts and genocides and mass slaughter and unspeakable horrors often happen because those who should have said something were in thrall to, or afraid of, the great powers?
The response to Higgins’s usual comments (the man supported the lunacy of Fidel Castro without any international criticism, for God’s sake) come after a pretty despicable attempt by the Israeli authorities to falsely paint the Irish people as “anti-Semitic” , pointing as evidence to one incident a hundred years ago and writing unfounded nonsense to smear a whole people because opposition to the war in Gaza is widespread in this country.
That’s why I feel this latest outrage about Higgins’s remarks seems a little choreographed. Either we are a stupid, irrelevant little country – or a threat to international order because of the views of our President-with-no-powers. It can’t be both.
Just as with the closure of the Israeli embassy, this seems more to me like another fuss precisely because Ireland is being made an example of what happens when you get too uppity in regard to global affairs largely decided by states more powerful than we are. And yes, there’s a price to pay for not toeing the line when the U.S. and the E.U. are on one side of a conflict, but should geo politics and diplomacy muzzle us to the point where we can’t express a view on an atrocity being life streamed before our eyes?
Most people who react angrily to this article, and there’s often a choreographed feeling about those comments too, won’t have even read it. They’ll accuse me of defending Higgins and Hamas or some such nonsense. And they’ll ignore the reports that tell us “world’s top arms producers see revenues rise on the back of wars and regional tensions”. Surely it would be the utmost naivety to pretend that war isn’t a very profitable business for a very powerful industry?
I’m no daisy-chain weaving peacenik, but I do think war should mostly be a last resort and avoided whenever possible. The human price that’s paid is often too terrible. And while I likely disagree with Higgins on most things, this pretence that his opposition to NATO’s spend should be seen as an international crisis for Ireland seems more than a little fake to me.