If President Higgins continues like this, a constitutional crisis looks inevitable

While the Coalition has shirked a confrontation with President Michael D Higgins there is no escaping the fact that he has abandoned the traditional constraints of his office by openly questioning Government policy and insulting fellow EU member states. If he continues to behave like this a constitutional crisis looks inevitable.

For a start his claims in an interview with the Business Post that the Government was trying “to crawl away” from the “self-esteem of our foreign policy” and the country’s traditional position on neutrality was deliberately provocative ahead of the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, which began its work on Thursday.

Not content with this harsh critique of the Government, he made pejorative comments about the chair of the forum, Prof Louise Richardson, one of the most distinguished Irish women of her generation who has made an enormous contribution to education in the UK. His subsequent attempt to minimise the insult by describing it as “a throwaway remark” hardly qualified as an apology.

Even more questionably the President dismissed retired and serving members of the Irish Defence Forces, of which he is notionally the supreme commander, with the disparaging line that the forum is mostly made up of “the admirals, the generals, the air force, the rest of it”.

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He also made insulting remarks about two of this country’s fellow EU member states, Lithuania and Latvia, saying that if you interfere with our policy of positive neutrality, “there’s no difference between you and Lithuania and Latvia”. The fact that the Baltic states strongly supported Ireland during the Brexit crisis, when it had nothing to do with their own self-interest, might have been expected to attract some form of solidarity from our head of State in their hour of danger.

His dismissal of the two countries – victims of mass murder and forced deportation at the hands of Russia during the second World War and for decades afterwards – was a revealing insight into the President’s world view.

And to cap it all he had a dig at president Emmanuel Macron of France’s recent comments that “the future of Europe is as the most reliable pillar in Nato”. He said Ireland was in danger of putting itself “behind the shadows of previous empires within the EU”. The implication is that we should avoid institutional security co-operation with France because it had an empire in the last century.

Tánaiste Micheál Martin articulated a very Irish attitude when he told an international gathering on Ukraine during the week that Russia wanted us “to let them repeat the model of stolen territories, expelled populations and frozen front lines.”

How this country’s security is to be provided for along its vast coastline without the help of our bigger neighbours, the UK and France, is something the President didn’t address, and begs the question as to whether the supreme commander of the Defence Forces believes in the right of this country to defend itself.

Incidentally, he also appears to have read the programme for the forum in a cursory fashion. He criticised it for not having a discussion on food insecurity when the very first panel on Thursday featured the head of international advocacy from Concern.

He also claimed that while the former neutral countries Finland and Sweden, who have hurriedly applied to join Nato for fear of invasion by Russia, were being heard, the voice of existing neutrals was not. In fact the views of that most neutral of all countries, Switzerland, will be heard.

[ Diarmaid Ferriter: Occasional tension is the price of an assertive presidency ]

The Government’s response to the President has been remarkably restrained given the way he questioned policy. Martin, whose brainchild the forum is, responded with a long statement setting out its remit while studiously avoiding any mention of President Higgins. Other Ministers were mild or even timid when asked for comment.

While there is an understandable reluctance on the part of Ministers to get involved in a demeaning debate with the President, there was surely a need for a stronger response. Of course there is a long-standing convention that politicians never express criticism of the President, who is deemed to be above politics. When the then-minister for defence Paddy Donegan breached that convention in 1976 he had to resign from the cabinet.

But what is a government to do if the President has no qualms about flouting the convention that he or she should not comment on current political issues? Surely the parties elected to govern the State in the interests of the people have a duty to defend the actions they deem appropriate in the public interest.

The danger of letting the President away without criticism is that his views may be accepted by the public as having more legitimacy than those of the Government itself. Higgins has clearly entered public debate in a partisan manner, and if not countered firmly could do huge damage to the credibility of our democratic institutions and the country’s international credibility.

His lack of concern for the conventions governing the President’s role may well have opened a Pandora’s box. The way is now open for a demagogue, of left or right, to campaign for office with the specific pledge to oppose the policies of the government of the day. A dangerous precedent has been set.