Michael D Higgins is misusing his power in policy debate

Eoin O'Malley

Irish President Michael D Higgins

June 19 2022 02:30 AM

Michael D Higgins is right about housing policy. Anything that delivers high levels of homelessness and high and rising rents has been a “great, great, great failure”. He’s right to say it’s not a crisis, “it is a disaster”. Only maybe the secretary general of the Department of Housing might disagree with him. And even he is probably not convinced.

When the President starts to look at the reasons for the failure he has a tendency to sound like a sociology undergraduate who’s recently discovered the word neo-liberal. His fondness for big words is not always matched by nuanced thinking. That’s OK, because we didn’t elect him to run the government or influence government policy.

Yet in his speech opening a housing facility in Co Kildare last week he drifted ever deeper into policy debates, accusing the Government of being a “star performer for the speculative sector internationally”. No one who heard it could say that he was doing anything other than taking a pop at the Government and its approach to housing. And he was enjoying it.

Immediately government ministers complained that the President “crossed a line”, and hardly for the first time. As is usual, the President didn’t mention a specific piece of legislation, just the general thrust of policy. Some Fianna Fáil ministers even hopefully speculated he was actually referring to the 2011-2020 governments, and not their own.

The Irish presidency lacks ‘hard power’, so it is natural that presidents seek to use their ‘soft power’ to advance their agenda. This usually means doing something symbolic, such as choosing where to travel or who to meet. Mary Robinson’s meetings with the Dalai Lama and handshake with Gerry Adams caused annoyance in the government at the time. Mary McAleese took communion in a Church of Ireland service in order to ‘build bridges’.

Michael D Higgins as President has been more direct than either of them. In 2012 he expressed his opposition to privatisation in the same week that the government was selling shares in state companies. He speculated openly whether he would summon the Council of State to consider whether to refuse to sign a bill on the Fiscal Compact should the government not consider it necessary to have a referendum. That was his right, but openly mulling it over before the government took a decision could be seen as an attempt to apply pressure.

More recently he has offered his hot takes on anything that happens to be in the news that day, from Elon Musk buying Twitter to the murder of 50 people in a Catholic church service in Nigeria. None of this is what we expect the President to do, but it usually elicits trills of delight from his loyal following, so why stop?

When the Constitution was being considered by the Dáil in 1937, Éamon de Valera told the Dáil the role would be above party politics. Articles 13.7.2 and 13.7.3 of the Constitution state the president may address the nation, but when he does so he must have that message approved by the government.

Dev became exasperated when asked whether a president could make a speech at the Dublin Chamber of Commerce that expresses opposition or criticism of the government or its policies: “I do not think it right that the president should be allowed to make any statement or give any address which would be contrary to the policy or the views of the government of the day.” There could not be two ‘authorities’.

Things may have changed, but Paddy Hillery spent 14 years isolated in Áras an Uachtaráin trying to depoliticise the office after a fairly minor spat saw Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resign. And no one can really do anything about Higgins’s forays into public debate.

He is immensely popular and most people think he’s right. This was the same issue then tánaiste Dick Spring faced when Mary Robinson did things he didn’t approve of. Albert Reynolds might have shared his annoyance but he could see her popularity: “No arguing with that. We walk around that. We let her off,” he told Spring.

The day after Higgins made his remarks, the opposition queued up at Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil to use his words against the Government. Unless he is naïve — and he isn’t — he knew this would happen.

This is the problem. The President is now having his ‘soft power’ used in hard politics. We might see a presidency that is increasingly a counterweight to the government. And as he reaches the end of his second term he might feel no reason to moderate his language in interventions in public debate. We might see him quoted in election literature or party political broadcasts. Higgins might object that this wasn’t his intention, but he has pushed the office so far into partisan politics that it might never go back.

That’s not a legacy he should be proud of.

Eoin O’Malley teaches politics and policy at Dublin City University