The idea of Michael D as president has crept up on us, apparently out of nowhere, writes JOHN WATERS
I STILL have, somewhere, the typewritten note I received from Michael D Higgins nearly 29 years ago, when I wrote to request an interview for Hot Press. It ends: "And of course it doesn't matter that you are unable to offer a fee", a response to my naive apology for the impecuniousness of both my employers and myself.
That sentence, it strikes me now, is an indicator of the instinctual kindness of Michael D Higgins: in brushing my apology aside, he did not want to draw attention to the gaucheness behind it. It was some time later I learned politicians never received payment for press interviews.
That interview, my first with a politician, meant a lot to me. The headline was “Something better change”, the title of a Stranglers song. Michael D was a hero when that species was thin on the ground.
In spite of occasional differences, he remains so: a shimmering streak of pure intellect in the forlorn landscape of Irish politics.
But 29 years is a mighty long time. We have moved through a changing world, in which what Michael D used to call “the forces of conservatism” have to a large extent been routed. Yet, things are by no means as we might have expected them to be in the wake of such victories. Almost everything has changed, but only some things for the better.
This morning is a good moment to reflect on such matters, as Michael D is being feted by a bunch of feminists at a press conference organised by Ivana Bacik under the heading "Women for Michael D Higgins". The assembled women include, inter alia, politicians past and present, writers, academics, singers and a former judge of the Supreme Court. The idea, according to Bacik, is that Michael D is someone who has always supported women's rights and has been to the vanguard in various feminist and liberal struggles.
Michael D is in his element and gives a perky, upbeat speech.
He declares how glad he is to be here among so many veterans of women’s battles down the years and thanks them for coming out to support the issues “at the core of my campaign”. He recalls coming into the Oireachtas as a senator in 1973 and being overawed and inspired by some of the women in the room. At the time, he remembers, Ireland was “quite an authoritarian, patriarchal society”. He speaks of the battles they fought, “some of which were lost”, and the “terrible sadness” that followed the first divorce referendum. These women, he said, had made the case for a real republic.
Remembering himself, he looks straight at me and says that the battle of rights also includes the rights of fathers in relation to their children. “It wasn’t just women’s issues – it was citizens’ issues”. Now he is into his core presidential theme: the forging of a “radical, inclusive citizenship”, where people are regarded for their inherent dignity rather than their status or possessions. Out of this, he says, would come a more creative society, where people would work better because of their sense of being valued for themselves rather for some “assumed status”.
The word “ethical”, he says, is important. “We are, I hope, coming out of an ethical vacuum.” He foresees the onset of a new age of ideas, not just in Ireland, but worldwide. Behind the recent period of speculative insanity, he said, were just a handful of intellectuals, and now a new age was about to dawn. In such an Ireland, “we will be more comfortable at home, and when people come here we will not describe them as ‘bed nights’.”
Michael D is deeply loved by many people and a source of bafflement to many others. The idea of him as president has crept up on us, apparently out of nowhere. What seems like all of a sudden, the enfant terrible of the Irish left is as a father figure to the nation. There is a sense about him of ancient battles, perhaps even a certain element of ideological time-warp, but this arises from political limits rather than intellectual ones.
But it is intriguing to reflect that, for someone renowned for his intellect, so much about his personality and its output is pure emotion. This quality does not fully emerge other than when he is making a speech in public. In interviews, he tends to be relatively low-key, in argument verging on disjointed. But when he speaks off-the-cuff to a theme that is fluid in his mind, he creates something akin to music. He reminds me of The Irish Man, in Tom Murphy's play The Gigli Concert: he wants to sing like Gigli but cannot, and yet, unbeknownst to himself, speaks as Gigli might have wished to speak had he by chance happened to hear such speaking.
Michael D begins his speeches quietly, restrainedly, in a kind of deceptive, almost whispered falsetto. There is a kind of exaggerated politeness about him at this point, which makes what follows even more spectacular. Gradually, as he builds his case, his voice develops weight and timbre, his tone, pitch and modulation shifting from bar to bar, from tenor to baritone to bass to baritone, up and down his considerable range of passion. As the aria builds, he moves his hands and arms, as though conducting himself.
The remarkable thing is that this occurs even when he is delivering a speech he has delivered a hundred times already, Each time is different. It’s all in his head and comes out in multiple forms, replete with new images and colours.
The next stop after the women’s gathering is a debate organised by the European Law Students Association at Maynooth University, when Michael D finds himself pitted – in theory at least – against David Norris. Seán Gallagher is supposed to have been here too, but has been tied up with an interview on TV3.
As at the earlier event, Michael D drums home his now familiar message about the “appropriate content of a republic” and calls again for a new relationship between economics and society. “We must try,” he declares, “to put Ireland together again.”
Then he’s off. “People describe what has happened as having come out of the ether,” he says. He again indicts “five major thinkers” – economists all, one gathers – but again forgets to name them. He talks about the responsibility of intellectuals. “I entered the public world because I believed in the power of ideas.” He condemns the “false logic” that has led to the “absurd position that the economy is rational but the people are not”. His wish for the students in the audience, he says, as he comes close to the crescendo, is that they might live in a country in which they were valued not as consumers “but as people”. He wishes them “joy and fulfilment”. The female colleague beside me is close to tears.
There follows what was laughably billed as a “debate”. Even though both Higgins and Norris have that very morning issued statements criticising one another, the occasion is less a debate than a love-in.
Norris causes the cringeometer to hit the red when he gazes lovingly at Michael D and coos that he wishes there was a vice-presidential role. “I’ve heard your poetry,” he declares lovingly, “and I love it.”
“Keep that up, David,” says Michael D with a coquettish grin, “you’re doing well.”
When the topic of their differences comes up, both men act like it is all a misunderstanding, even though the press releases from both were pretty unequivocal (and also accurate). Higgins had accused Norris of gilding the lily in relation to his position on the bank guarantee, pointing out that he hadn’t voted in the first division in the Seanad on October 1st, 2008. Norris retaliated by accusing Michael D of having supported the Rainbow coalition’s tax amnesty in 1993.
Now, sitting beside one another, the two refuse to wrestle. “It’s the nicest spat in history,” says Norris. Michael D explains that the issuing of his statement was a “botún” – a mistake, though not by him.
Someone in his office sent out the statement without checking with the candidate. “It was one of those rare occasion when something went out of the office without me seeing it. I’m not making any spat with David Norris,” he says. Asked if they have a transfer pact, Michael D said they haven’t. They have not given any advice to their voters about number twos. “But we wouldn’t be against it now.”