Like O'Higgins, McDowell has a hard head but a homely heart
Looking back, historians of the future will remark on the similarities between O'Higgins and McDowell - in private character, devotion to duty, and the antipathy they aroused not only among their IRA enemies but among their less devoted colleagues.
Far from favouring force as a first option, O'Higgins was almost the last member of the Free State government to support the execution of Erskine Childers.
The gentle Eoin MacNeill convinced him it was the minimum needed to stop the civil war: "The right amount of force to be employed is the right amount to put that thing down, and to put it down as quickly as possible." And it worked, too.
Similarly, although McDowell employs a lethal rhetoric against republicans, his bark is worse than his bite. He has left the door open for dialogue, and he has shown no sign of availing himself of other weapons in the iron armoury of the Irish Republic, which include selective internment.
NEVERTHELESS, like O'Higgins, McDowell arouses the antipathy of all the muppets in Irish politics. Not surprisingly, Sinn Fein give him stick. But even senior muppets in Fianna Fail and Fine Gael echo the line that McDowell should shut up. Enda Kenny and David Andrews are only two of the confederacy of dunces who believe that McDowell needs "a strip of sticking plaster", or that he should "have his trumpet taken away".
In fact, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are deeply in McDowell's debt. His relentless, repetitive assaults on Sinn Fein are brilliant examples of negative advertising, "branding" that party with the mark of the beast, and deeply damaging them with the Irish bourgeoisie - as the next General Election will show.
Privately, many Fianna Failers admit as much. Even left liberals, sotto voce, say they admire McDowell's stand against IRA criminality. But he is in real danger of being popular following his full, fearless and frank change of course on the deportation of a Nigerian boy last week.
Far from being a surrender to public pressure, it was a surrender to specific circumstances in the sensible spirit of Edmund Burke, who said: "The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind."
Like O'Higgins, McDowell has a hard head but a homely heart. O'Higgins said: "The State is you and me and the man around the corner." McDowell has widened that to include a Nigerian boy in the school around the corner.
McDowell is the man who minds the State.
Like O'Higgins, his life is always on the line. We knew he had the guts to be hard. But now we know he has the guts to be soft.
Lucky for us, it looks like when they made O'Higgins they didn't break the mould.
- Eoghan Harris
