A President for all the people
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Saturday November 12 2011
Our new President Michael D Higgins would be entitled to feel a trifle miffed that his inauguration was upstaged by the news that Sean Quinn, formerly Ireland's richest man, had been declared bankrupt in Belfast.
However, if he was, our ninth President didn't show it. Instead he delivered perhaps the most memorable inauguration speech delivered by any Irish president yesterday.
Without intruding on the political role of the Government, he managed to lay out a vision of the presidency, which, while recognising our current economic difficulties, held out hope of a better future and appealed to our better nature.
In the space of less than 15 minutes, he covered a lot of ground; the need for constitutional reform, an ethical society, the importance of the arts, an inclusive society and reaching out to the Irish diaspora.
"We Irish are a creative, resourceful, talented and warm people with a firm sense of common decency and justice," President Higgins said.
In the hands of a less accomplished orator or a less sincere politician it could have come across as terribly clichéd, the sort of official boilerplate that speechwriters turn out by the bale every day.
Not yesterday.
It is to our new President's credit that, in a public career stretching back almost 40 years, he has won the respect of virtually all of the population, something that was proven by his success in becoming the first ever candidate in any Irish election to secure more than one million votes in last month's presidential election.
Even those who have occasionally disagreed with our new President during his long and sometimes tumultuous political career never ceased to hold him in high regard.
And even before his remarkable success in the presidential election he was one of the few Irish politicians universally known by first name, always "Michael D", never "Mr Higgins". We instinctively felt that somehow we knew him and that he was on our side.
At times the presidential election campaign seemed like a latter-day demolition derby with proceedings all too often taking on a mean-spirited and sometimes downright nasty tone. Only President Michael D Higgins managed to rise above the fray and, by so doing, merely emphasised his suitability to hold the highest office in the land.
The presidential election campaign may have taken far too long but there can be little doubt that in the end democracy did its work and we have in Michael D Higgins a President for all the people.
Irish Independent
