EUROPEAN UNION member states will sacrifice their legitimacy if the public believes they are unable to influence economic decisions by their vote, President Michael D Higgins has declared in an interview to be broadcast on Al Jazeera TV today.
Economics must be made “accountable and transparent in some way” for citizens. If not, he said, “what happens then is that you’re sacrificing legitimacy, and one is creating the ground for a naked conflict between a massive number of populations of different kinds and size who feel at the mercy of the economy”.
Mr Higgins conducted the interview for Frost Over The World, hosted by David Frost, during his visit to London last week.
Each EU state faces difficulties to provide opportunities for its citizens, he said, but “it can’t leave the welfare of its citizens to the outcomes of markets assumed to be rational, but which are highly speculative and irrational”. Despite the current difficulties, the President said he remained optimistic. “I’ve never lost hope because, you know, why should I? Let me give you an example of it all. My father and my uncles were in the Irish War of Independence.
“In the Irish Civil War they were on different sides. I am a person from a family that might never have expected to go near a university. I’ve been to universities and I’ve taught in universities in Ireland and the United States, and I’m President and so on.
“And I think of the journeys that different Irish people have made that have been harder than mine. Irish people are enormously resilient,” he told the presenter.
“We will, I have no doubt whatsoever, come out of all of this a much, much stronger people,” he went on.
Questioned about the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the President said the Irish people “remain profoundly spiritual in orientation”, despite the church’s loss of authority. “Trust can be rebuilt. But it has to be re-earned, as in everything else.
“I think that people like Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and others in Dublin, who have been very open, they have looked at the reports, they have taken very difficult decisions; I think that they are reforming people.
“The church will survive, I think, but it will be different. You’re probably never again going to see unaccountable structures where you could hide or cloak misdemeanours or grave transgressions.
“You probably will get a sparer, but more real, more transparent, more participatory form of church, and I think it will sit alongside some people who may ordinarily not affiliate to church but who are deeply spiritual people.”