Why Higgins interest in a second term is welcome news

It seems increasingly clear that, as with the electorate, most of our politicians would like to see President Michael D Higgins serve a second term from next November.

An Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll last October found that 64 per cent of voters said he should, 29 per cent said he should not, and 7 per cent didn't know. Support was strong across supporters of all parties.

For his own part, the President, who said he would serve only one term when campaigning for the office in 2011, said he would make his intentions known later this year. And as reported in this paper yesterday he has started to prepare the ground for an announcement in July that he will seek a second term.

It will be welcome news. In recent weeks it has become even more clear that the political parties are baulking at the cost of a presidential election. They estimate the cost could be up to €500,000 for each party.

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Bitter divisions

It is an expense they could do without with local and European elections taking place in June of next year and the strong possibility of a general election between this and then. But there is a far more important reason why Higgins should serve a second term. In his very person he represents the overcoming of those bitter divisions which plagued this State for so many decades through the last century

His father John Higgins and his uncles were active in the IRA during the War of Independence. In the Civil War his father took the anti-Treaty side, while his uncle Peter served on the pro-Treaty side.

We will need someone of his calibre and experience to be our head of State as we mark the potentially fraught centenaries ahead

John Higgins was shunned by employers after the Civil War, while his uncle Peter was an officer in the Army. John Higgins sank into poverty and died in a county home. Two of his children, including the President, were raised by their uncle Peter.

As Higgins recalled in a 2016 Irish Times interview: "I was five; my brother was four when – the 15th of August 1946 – my father falls back in bed very ill and we go out to Co Clare to be reared by a very kind uncle and aunt. It was supposed to be temporary, but it ended up more permanent."

Higgins is singularly equipped to guide Ireland safely through the next critical years. We will need someone of his calibre and experience to be our head of State as we mark the potentially fraught centenaries ahead.

In the next seven years Ireland will commemorate the War of Independence (1919-1922), the establishment of the State (1922), the Civil War (1922/23), and the boundary commission which established the border (1925).

As Higgins said himself in his Michael Collins commemoration address at Béal na Bláth, Co Cork, in August 2016, anticipating the centenaries ahead: “We will need to display courage and honesty as we seek to speak the truth of the period, and in recognising that, during the War of Independence, and particularly during the Civil War, no single side had the monopoly of either atrocity or virtue.”

Our concern for the truth should not collapse into shallow point scoring

He said “we will be required to face, too, the ruthlessness of many executions performed by the IRA, the mistakes that inevitably happened in killings of purported informers, the executions of Republican prisoners during the Civil War, and the outrages perpetrated during both wars against Protestant people, some of whom were attacked regardless of their actual attitude towards the struggles under way.”

‘Settling of vendettas’

It was also important, he said, “to recognise that the cover of the Civil War was used by some for the settling of vendettas, some local and some ancient.

“Our concern for the truth should not, however, collapse into shallow point scoring. It will need to be made meaningful by both a real sense of history and a generous willingness to go past old wrongs so as to build a new, shared understanding of who we are as a nation and as a Republic.”

He concluded that important address by saying that “with the passing of years, we can find a new generosity towards the different strands of historical memory held by the people of this island, all of them and go forward in a new way, acknowledging that the past has happened, that we must face, not evade, its darkest corners, but that the future remains alive with great possibilities”.

Nor should he be put off by accusations that he changed his mind on serving a second term. It was the 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.

And as for those who say that he will be too old at 77 to begin a second term in November, they might remember that the two heads of state with whom Ireland has a particular familiarity are older.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is 91 while Pope Francis is 81. Neither could be said to be held back by age in executing their duties.

Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent