President should be able to reflect public opinion –and encourage dialogue and constructive criticism

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The issue of President Higgins speaking out

(A student’s perspective)

Alannah Ita Healy

“Playing with fire”. That is the phrase President Michael D Higgins used last weekend when rebuking the Government for launching a debate over Irish neutrality, speaking ahead of the upcoming Consultative Forum on International Foreign Policy.

In an interview with The Business Post on Sunday, the President criticised Ireland’s foreign policy “drift”, warning against deviation from traditional “positive neutrality” and directly questioning the set-up of the upcoming forum. His comments have drawn a significant degree of backlash, with many complaining that as President, he has an obligation to retain political impartiality and not be seen to criticise the government of the day.

It’s not the first time the president has found himself in trouble for ‘speaking out of turn’ and expressing personal political views when many would argue he should remain neutral –in fact it’s not even the first time it’s happened this year.

In April, Higgins came under fire for criticising economic policy and the “obsession” with achieving economic growth. He described economists as being “stuck in an inexorable growth narrative” and policy as being out of “touch with anything meaningful” – comments which drew a backlash from economists.

But the incident people will likely be quicker to remember came in June of last year, when President Higgins publicly dubbed the housing crisis a “disaster”, describing the state of housing cynically (but not inaccurately) as a “great, great failure”. Sparing all fluff, he made a speech condemning the lack of action taken to address housing in no uncertain terms, calling out market-driven investment in homebuilding, noting the rise in homeless youth, and highlighting the deeply-felt impact the crisis was having (and continues to have) for so many. His comments were frank, passionate, and timely – and decidedly refreshing coming against the more wishy-washy political-speak that elected representatives had been feeding into the news cycle on a loop for weeks prior. With no real change being seen to happen in tandem with their comments, discourse from such politicians had begun to feel more like an exercise in appeasing people’s outrage over the issue and being seen to care, rather than an effort to actually address housing itself.

But Higgins’ speech undoubtedly raised eyebrows within government and, to a degree, within the public. He received a significant amount of criticism for weighing in on a matter of active political controversy and again, for being seen to criticise government while being our head of state.

But it’s worth noting that his comments fell heavily in line with majority opinion on the subject, so when reactions started coming in about the fact that Ireland’s President – a for-all-intents-andpurposes ceremonial post – had come out and expressly condemned government inaction in meeting the basic needs of its citizens, he was spared a lot of the potential outcry because, well, in the eyes of most people, he was right.

Then we come to last week, and the president’s