AMERICA:There was a certain piquancy to seeing Michael D, scourge of speculative banking and the tyranny of markets, visiting Wall Street, writes LARA MARLOWE
IT WAS impossible to say where Michael D Higgins was happiest this week, because he and Sabina sailed through that virtual place called Irish America beaming smiles of blissful contentment.
Their American tour, which will culminate at the Kennedy Library in Boston this afternoon, took Ireland’s President back to the 1960s, when as a student he caught a Greyhound bus from Times Square to Indiana.
Irish theatre productions reminded the Higginses of Sabina’s years at the Focus Theatre in Dublin. The historian Joe Lee introduced the erstwhile Prof Higgins’s learned – some might say woolly – exposition on inter-disciplinary study of Irish migration at Glucksman House, New York University.
The President was reunited with his old companero Kevin Cahill, the Manhattan physician and chairman of the American Irish Historical Society he’d met in Managua in the early 1980s. Cahill told me how Sandinista leaders convened at his upper west side apartment to plot the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.
By chance, Tomás Borge, the last of the commandantes, had just died. Higgins and Cahill walked arm in arm through the society’s elegant mansion, two white-haired gentlemen, transported back 30 years.
Higgins the poet quoted Eavan Boland, Séamus Heaney and Derek Mahon in his masterful lecture on Irishness at the historical society . The President’s aides thought he was happiest pressing the flesh at Irish immigrant centres in the Bronx and Yonkers. Everywhere, he was perceived more as a public intellectual than a politician.
“He’s a wonderful man,” gushed Mike Fogarty (85), a retired air conditioning repairman from Tipperary. “I’ve read some of his poems. He’s a very intellectual person.”
Yesterday, Michael D was a Galwegian, quoting JFK who said “nearly everyone from Boston comes from Galway”. Boston was “the capital of Irish America”, Mr Higgins noted. “One in every four people in Massachusetts claim Irish ancestry, the highest in the entire country.”
He was happy, too, in the corridors of power, chatting with New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. At City Hall, the poet-president and Hibernophile billionaire – with a fortune estimated at $22 billion – cut a study in contrasts.
At 70, Michael B has the ageless, cosmetic aura of the fabulously wealthy: smooth, tanned skin, brown hair, svelte figure. Michael D, 71, looked not so much older as more authentic.
There was a certain piquancy to seeing Higgins, scourge of speculative banking and the tyranny of markets, on Wall Street, or dining alongside Brian Moynihan, chief executive of Bank of America, at the Ireland Fund gala. Yet in his forays into economic territory, Michael D talked exports and investment with the best of them.
At the Innovation Ireland lunch in Boston yesterday, he borrowed a page from earlier visits by the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, vaunting Irish prowess in financial services, software, pharmaceuticals, the agriculture and food sectors.
Throughout the week, the President denounced the “artificial economy” that dragged Ireland down. At the Ireland Fund gala, he relented somewhat, saying, “We have resolved as a people to move beyond anger or cynicism.” Art and culture saved Ireland “at a time when other institutions failed us”. They gave him two standing ovations.
Greed is still good in New York, but there was nonetheless a sense of the tide turning at the Ireland Fund millionaires’ charity fest.
Remembering her late husband Lew, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, chair of the American Ireland Fund, insisted honourable bankers still existed.
“Some say it’s not easy being a banker in America today,” Brian Moynihan reflected. He quoted from Jonathan Swift: “A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.”
Twice, President Higgins referred reporters to pre-presidential writings and speeches, regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement and Palestine.
“I am as President now no longer free to speak about specifics,” he said. “But obviously, as a moral human being, such information as I have acquired in my life means that my views haven’t changed.”
Everywhere he went, the President dispensed wisdom. Young professionals from the Irish Network laughed when he told them: “It is possible to be successful without behaving appallingly and making everyone else around you miserable.”
At the Emerald Isle centre, he returned to a favourite theme: “It’s on the one small, shared, vulnerable planet we all are.” If there was a constant message throughout the President’s visit, it was that human beings must learn from their errors, “abandon failed [economic] paradigms”.
Charles McCabe, a retired New York banker with a house in Mullaghmore, offered a simplistic but affectionate assessment of the President at the Consul General’s reception. “He’s like a leprechaun,” McCabe told me.
“Short and happy; someone you want to be friends with. He makes me forget the troubles Ireland is going through.”
