President urges people not to turn back on State despite faults of political system

President Michael D Higgins has said that the Irish parliamentary system had faults and limits, but urged people not to “walk away from the State”.

He said that electoral politics should not be viewed as being entirely separate from social activism, and added that lessons could be learned from those who sought to reform society.

“You cannot walk away from the State. If you think in Irish history of how long it took us to get to the kind of democratic accountability of a limited kind that is provided through electoral politics … and the representation of people for example who might have been excluded,” he said.

Mr Higgins was giving a speech to mark the 75th anniversary of NUI Maynooth’s department of sociology.