“I find it extraordinary, our first citizen, Úachtarán na hÉireann, can come out very honourably and state the blindingly obvious… and somehow he gets criticised for that. I commend him for that, I commend that type of honesty”.
Those were the words, yesterday morning, of the leader of the opposition, Mary Lou McDonald. They were echoed across the spectrum of opposition politicians. When President Higgins, on Tuesday, tore into the country’s Government over housing, he was right, and that’s, really, all that matters. He spoke truth, and therefore was honourable. He spoke for the people, and therefore was right to do so. Criticising the President for exceeding his remit is unfair, and slightly bitter, and – in that great political phrase – “misses the point”. That’s how the case for the defence goes. It never goes much further.
But here’s a question: If the President is going to exceed his remit to criticise housing policy, why has he not exceeded his remit to… do anything about it? He has, after all, signed every housing bill put before him by the Government without comment, or complaint. Every single one of those laws which, in his words, “bring us back to the days of the poorhouse”, bears his signature, and his official seal.
“Oh but he can’t do that”, comes the reply. Why not? He’s the President, after all. He speaks for the people.
He just doesn’t act for them. It costs him nothing to say a few words. Taking a stand might cost him something, and we couldn’t expect that, could we?
It is, I might venture, no coincidence that this latest outburst came after the most embarrassing moment of his Presidency, when he shamefully blamed the murder of 50 christians in Nigeria on “Climate Change” and earned himself a rebuke from local community leaders. A man so conscious of the vagueries of the modern left as the President is might have realised, even if nobody said it, how racist his statement was. After all, he does not blame shootings by white fellows in America on “Climate Change”. He seemed to be suggesting that Africans were so feeble mentally and in terms of character that slightly hotter weather alone was enough to drive them to mass murder. It was a shameful, mortifying moment, and the media were, slowly and reluctantly enough, beginning to catch on to it.
And so, we got the outburst on Tuesday. Calculated, timed to perfection, and delivered with the customary performance of the nation’s circus ringmaster. The quavering voice, the righteous indignation, the careful briefing to the press in advance that he might say something noteworthy, just so as to make sure that the news cameras were there, which of course they dutifully were.
The President, of course, can do nothing about housing. He has no policymaking role. He cannot propose a law, nor can he even veto one effectively. It is not his job.
What is his job, though, is this: He is steward of the highest public office in the land. We chose the Presidency to fulfil the role of a constitutional monarch, which, for years after our independence until we declared ourselves a Republic, was fulfilled by George V and George VI. He is an elected version of Elizabeth II of England, and the job he has is the one she has: To unify the country, to provide a civic office independent from and separate to party politics, and – critically – to represent the embodiment of the state. He is, in many respects, the state. No laws get passed, no proclamations issued, but through him.
People tend to discount the importance of this role, political partisans most of all. It never seems to occur to them that maybe it is a good idea to have a leader around whom the whole country can unify, and offer their support.
If none of this matters to you, consider that Peter Casey, a very unpolished candidate, secured a fifth of the vote against the President in the last election for that office. It is not beyond the realms of imagination that a more polished and professional performer with the same message might succeed, next time out, in winning the job. If that President decides to speak his mind, will the great and the good in Ireland be as tolerant? Will they put up with a President who talks about the dangers of immigration, and the over-reach of the European Union, or who, in the manner of Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, expresses support for Vladimir Putin?
Because by then, it will of course be too late.
The President cannot do a thing – not a thing – about housing in Ireland. That is not his job. His job – the one he was elected to do – is to protect the dignity and respect in which the office of President is held. He is, in this instance, speaking out on the thing he cannot do, and in the process, undermining the one job he was elected to do.
This is, naturally, one of those pieces that will be unpopular. Nobody – perhaps least of all Gript readers – wants to hear it. He trashed those wasters in Government, goes the thinking, and I won’t criticise him for that. Government politicians, whose defining trait these days is cowardice, certainly won’t criticise him, and will instead hope in vain that if they spare him any word of reproach, he might not be nasty about them again. That’s their defining strategy with the opposition in general, let alone the President.
But nobody saying it doesn’t make it wrong. The President didn’t fix housing on Tuesday. He didn’t make a blind bit of difference to anybody. He just used people’s passions as a distraction from his own cock up on Nigeria, and undermined his office in the process. He’s a terrible President, and that, of course, is why he’s popular. The worst ideas are always popular, at first. That’s how they get implemented in the first place. Higgins is just part of the broader rot in the country. But we all voted for it – every last element of it, up to and including the housing crisis he criticises.