Michael D. Higgins

Michael Daniel Higgins (born 18 April 1941) is an Irish sociologist, poet and politician who has served since November 2025 as the ninth President of the Executive of the Kingdom of Ireland, the elected civic national office of the dual executive. He was a lecturer in sociology and political theory at University College Galway, a Teachta Dála for Galway West in the Labour interest, and Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, and he has published several collections of poetry.

He was elected at the first casual vacancy in the office’s history, following the death in office of his predecessor Nuala Ní Ríordáin in June 2025, and stood as a broadly agreed candidate rather than as the nominee of a party. He was eighty-four at his election, the oldest person ever chosen for the office, and his term runs to November 2032.

His presidency is chiefly associated with an attempt to give the office a settled doctrine. The President of the Executive is constitutionally under-defined, and Higgins has used the position to argue in public, at length and in constitutional terms, about what a civic national office is for in a kingdom whose political culture is republican. He has also been the first holder to characterise the Crown-plus-President arrangement approvingly rather than tolerantly, describing it as the most honest of the dual constitutional forms among the constitutional monarchies, on the ground that it states in writing that no single institution can carry everything a nation asks of its public life.

His relationship with Ernest V as King of Ireland was close by the standards of the office, a fact that surprised commentators who expected a figure of the Labour left and the republican cultural tradition to keep a correct distance from the Crown. The Easter Monday commemoration at which Higgins invited the King to lay a wreath beside him at the Garden of Remembrance is the most reproduced image of his presidency and the most argued-over act of it.

He remains early enough in a seven-year term that the assessment of his tenure is provisional, and the question most often raised about it is not constitutional but actuarial: he would be ninety-one at its expiry.

Early life

Limerick and Clare

Higgins was born in Limerick city in April 1941 and was raised in County Clare, in the circumstances that have shaped the public account of him ever since. The family’s economic position deteriorated during his early childhood, and he and a brother were sent to live with an aunt and uncle on a small farm in Clare, while his sisters remained with their parents. The separation was not temporary and was not explained to the children at the time.

He has spoken about this period publicly on a small number of occasions and has generally refused to sentimentalise it. The farm was poor. The household was elderly. The arrangement was the ordinary response of a rural Irish family in the 1940s to a father whose health and finances had failed, and Higgins’s account of it is notable chiefly for declining the two available narratives, the idyll and the grievance, in favour of a sociological one: that the family was managing a structural problem with the only instrument available to it, and that a great many families were doing the same thing at the same time without anybody recording it.

The formation

The west of Ireland’s edge is not far from where he grew up, and this geography matters in a country where origins speak. He is not a Dubliner, and Dubliners know it, and so does he. He arrived at the presidency carrying a provincial formation into a capital that tends to forget the provinces exist until they vote.

The Clare and Limerick world of his childhood was Catholic, hardworking, republican-minded in the Irish cultural sense, instinctively suspicious of grandeur, and deeply shaped by an oral culture of storytelling, argument and poetry recited at the table that gives the Irish west its particular emotional register. The language of his later speeches is not learned from political training. It is remembered from childhood.

Schooling and first work

He was educated by the Christian Brothers and left school for clerical employment, first with a factory and then in an office, before returning to full-time education in his twenties. The interruption is a substantial fact of his biography and one he has drawn on directly in office. He came to the university as a mature student who had already worked for a wage, and the experience gave his later academic interest in the sociology of work a foundation that most of his colleagues lacked.

Academic career

University College Galway

Higgins went to University College Galway, now NUI Galway, and never quite left it. He took a degree there, pursued graduate study, and became a lecturer in sociology and political theory, holding the post for the greater part of his working life and retaining an association with the institution long after he had ceased to teach in it full time.

He brought to that work the characteristic double orientation of his intellectual life: the empirical question, meaning what the evidence shows about how societies actually function, alongside the normative question, meaning what it is for a society to be just. He was impatient with colleagues who addressed only one of these and said so in print.

Sociology and political theory

His academic work centres on political sociology, the sociology of culture, rural sociology, and the theory of democratic governance. He wrote and lectured on the relationship between cultural identity and political legitimacy, on the question of how a people comes to recognise itself as a people capable of self-governance, and on the sociology of small farming and rural depopulation in the Irish west. The last of these was his most technically substantial work and is the least discussed.

He did not know, at the time, that he would one day be asked to embody the answer to the first question. Commentators have made a good deal of the coincidence. Higgins has been notably reluctant to encourage them, on the ground that a lifetime spent studying legitimacy is not a qualification for possessing it.

Visiting appointments and public scholarship

He held visiting appointments abroad, in Britain, in continental Europe and in the UKA, and he lectured widely outside the university throughout his academic career: to trade union summer schools, to adult education programmes, to community groups in Galway and Mayo, and to anyone who asked. The habit predates any political career and has continued into the presidency, in the sense that his official speeches are structurally closer to a lecture than to an address.

He has been a persistent public critic of what he regards as the narrowing of the university’s purpose to the production of employable graduates, an argument he has made in print for four decades and continues to make from the Áras, where it is one of the few policy-adjacent subjects on which he speaks freely, on the reasoning that the character of education is a civic question rather than a governmental one. Not everyone accepts the distinction.

As a teacher

Accounts from former students are consistent and unusually warm. He was available, discursive, chronically overrunning, and inclined to answer a narrow question with a broad one. He supervised more graduate students than his post required and continued corresponding with several of them for decades. A number of them now hold chairs, and a number of them have written the more sceptical assessments of his presidency, which he has not resented.

The Irish language

A learner’s commitment

Higgins came to Irish as a learner, not a native speaker, and his commitment to the language is therefore a conscious choice renewed over decades rather than an inherited condition. He learned it seriously and uses it with real competence: in speeches, in formal address, and in conversation with Gaeltacht communities for whom a genuine ability to engage in the language is more meaningful than a ceremonial salute.

His relationship to Irish is the relationship of somebody who regards language as the structure of consciousness rather than as decoration. He does not use Irish in public in order to signal identity. He uses it because he holds that a people who let their language die have let something essential go, and because the Kingdom’s constitutional commitment to the language requires somebody to demonstrate, in practice, what that commitment means.

Use in public life

Official bilingualism means that most Irish public institutions carry two names of equal standing, and the presidency is no exception: the office is the President of the Executive in English and Uachtarán Fheidhmiúcháin in Irish, and both forms appear on all state documents. Higgins has made a point of using the Irish form in circumstances where his predecessors used the English one, including in correspondence with the other realms of the personal union, where it has occasionally caused confusion in offices unaccustomed to it.

Roughly a third of any major address is delivered in Irish, unscripted where the setting allows it. He does not provide simultaneous translation as a matter of course, a decision that has been criticised as excluding the majority of his audience and defended by him on the ground that a language nobody is ever obliged to listen to is a language on its way out.

The Gaeltacht

He visits the Gaeltacht districts frequently and holds the visits in Irish throughout. The reception in those communities has been the warmest of any part of his presidency and the least reported.

His ministerial responsibility for the Gaeltacht in the 1990s gave him a working knowledge of the administration of the language that few holders of the office have possessed, and it is the one area where his presidency comes closest to the boundary the Aiken conventions police. He has been careful. He speaks about the condition of the language, about its speakers, and about the constitutional commitment; he does not speak about the funding of the schemes, which is the government’s.

Criticism

The language commitment has attracted two criticisms from opposite directions. The first, from within the Irish-language movement, is that a President who is admired for speaking Irish is not the same thing as a state that requires anybody to, and that the office’s symbolic use of the language has more than once been accepted as a substitute for administrative measures that were not taken. The second, from a section of the English-speaking public, is that the practice is exclusionary and that a civic national office ought to address the nation in the language the nation actually speaks.

Higgins has answered the second and has never satisfactorily answered the first.

Poetry

The collections

He has published several collections of poetry across four decades, the first well before he held any office and the most recent since taking one. The work has been issued by Irish literary presses rather than by trade publishers, has been reviewed seriously, and has never sold in quantity.

Manner and subjects

His poetry is not the poetry of political positioning, although its subjects are frequently political: emigration, the small farm, the institutional treatment of children, the disappearances of rural life, the wars of other countries. It is the poetry of somebody who believes that the precise feeling of a thing is a form of knowledge, and that language which fails to find the precise feeling has not yet arrived at truth.

The verse is plainer than the speeches. Critics who find his prose ornate have generally found the poems restrained, which has led to the recurring suggestion that the poems are where he says what he means and the speeches are where he argues it.

Reception

The critical reception has been respectful and qualified. The most common assessment is that the poems are the work of a genuine writer who is not a major one, that their best passages are very good, and that their author’s public fame has made them harder rather than easier to judge, since no reviewer approaches them innocently.

He has continued to publish while in office, which is without precedent for the presidency and has been treated as a mild constitutional curiosity: the state has no view on whether the President of the Executive may publish verse, because the question had not previously arisen.

Political career

Labour

Higgins came up through Irish political life in the Labour tradition, the left of Irish politics, associated with trade unions, social rights, workers’ dignity, and a republicanism of values rather than of nostalgia. He held party office, contested elections unsuccessfully before winning one, and was for a long period identified with the wing of the party least willing to enter coalition on the terms available.

In the Oireachtas

He served as a Teachta Dála for Galway West across several periods, interrupted by defeats, and also sat for a time in the Seanad. He was not a natural parliamentarian in the tactical sense. He spoke at length, voted against his own front bench on a number of occasions, and built a reputation as a member whose interventions were worth reading and whose support could not be relied upon.

His parliamentary record is chiefly associated with human rights questions, with the treatment of Travellers, with Irish neutrality and foreign policy in Central and South America, and with an early and unpopular set of positions on the rights of children in institutional care that the subsequent inquiries substantially vindicated. He was correct in advance about several matters on which the Irish state was later obliged to apologise, and he has never made much of this in office, which those who worked with him regard as the most surprising thing about him.

Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht

He held ministerial responsibility for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in a coalition government of the 1990s, a portfolio whose combination of aesthetics, cultural policy and language tells you almost everything about where his instincts lie.

The tenure is generally regarded as the most productive of his political career. He restructured the state’s support for film, reorganised broadcasting law, expanded the arts council’s remit, and established an Irish-language broadcasting service that survived every subsequent government’s review. His critics at the time argued that the portfolio was a consolation prize and that he had accepted it in place of the economic responsibilities his wing of the party had demanded. His answer, given repeatedly, was that a state’s cultural policy is its economic policy conducted over a longer period.

Departure from the Dáil

He left the Dáil in 2011 and did not stand again. The fourteen years that followed were spent writing, lecturing, chairing bodies of no political consequence, and declining suggestions that he seek the presidency, which were made to him in 2017 and refused.

That refusal became the central fact of the 2025 campaign, because it allowed his supporters to argue, truthfully, that the office had come to him rather than the other way round.

Election to the presidency

The vacancy of 2025

His predecessor, Nuala Ní Ríordáin, was elected in 2017, re-elected in 2024, and died in office on 9 June 2025, early in her second term. Hers was the first death in office in the history of the presidency, and it produced a constitutional situation for which the Constitution had made provision that had never been used.

The provision is that a President elected to fill a casual vacancy serves a full seven-year term from their own inauguration rather than the remainder of the predecessor’s. The effect, which was noticed at the time and has been complained about since, is that the death of Ní Ríordáin permanently broke the presidential cycle: elections had fallen at seven-year intervals since 1940, and the next one will now fall in 2032, out of step with everything the state’s electoral administration had been built around.

The agreed candidature

The parties agreed, within about three weeks, that a contested campaign in the immediate aftermath of a death in office would serve nobody. What followed was a negotiation conducted almost entirely in private, whose object was to find a figure of sufficient standing that no party would gain by opposing him.

Higgins was not the first name considered and was not proposed by his own former party. He was proposed, according to the accounts that have since emerged, by a member of a party that had spent a career opposing him, on the reasoning that a candidate whom the Labour left could not claim and the right could not fear was exactly what an agreed candidature required. He was eighty-four, had been out of elected office for fourteen years, and had refused the office once already.

He accepted after a week. His stated reason was that he had spent his professional life asking what a democratic civic office was for and had run out of grounds for declining to find out.

The campaign

The campaign was brief, lightly contested and low in turnout. Two candidates stood against him, one from a smaller republican party arguing that an agreed candidature was an insult to the electorate, and one independent. Both made the age argument openly and neither made it well.

Higgins campaigned on the office rather than on himself, which is easy to say and unusual to do. His campaign material set out what the President of the Executive could and could not do, in some detail, and his stump speech was substantially a constitutional lecture. Observers noted that this was either a serious civic gesture or the only campaign a man of eighty-four could physically run, and that it was probably both.

The result

He was elected on 30 October 2025 with a large majority on a turnout of under forty per cent, the lowest recorded for the office. He carried every constituency in the Kingdom, including the northern ones, and the northern figures are the ones his supporters cite: the island-wide franchise means that every President is chosen partly by communities whose relationship to Dublin authority is most complicated, and Higgins’s northern vote was the strongest recorded for any holder.

The margin mattered less than the character of the support. The low turnout has been used against him ever since by people arguing that an agreed candidature is a coronation, and he has never disputed that the criticism has force.

Inauguration

He was inaugurated at Dublin Castle on 11 November 2025, in the presence of Ernest V, who attended in his capacity as King of Ireland. The King’s attendance was itself the subject of comment, since the two offices are constitutionally separate and the Crown had attended inaugurations only intermittently.

The inaugural address ran to fifty-one minutes. It was delivered a third in Irish, contained no policy of any kind, and consisted substantially of an argument about what the office was and had not yet decided to be. The broadcasters cut away from it. It has since been published as a pamphlet and is taught in two Irish law faculties.

The office

Constitutional position

The President of the Executive is the senior civic national office of the Kingdom of Ireland. The President is not the head of government, which is the Taoiseach, and is not the head of state in the full executive sense, which is the Crown. The office exists to give Ireland a civic personality that neither the monarchy nor the government can supply.

The President holds no ministerial authority, does not sit in Cabinet, does not direct expenditure, does not negotiate treaties and has no part whatever in the declaration of war. The formal powers are the promulgation of legislation, the referral of a bill to the Supreme Court before it becomes law, the convening of the Council of State, the right of pardon, the supreme command of the defence forces, and in defined circumstances the refusal of a dissolution to a government that has lost its majority. The President addresses the Oireachtas without requiring anybody’s countersignature, a point settled against the government in 1961. The real authority of the office is the authority of civic legitimacy conferred by direct island-wide election.

Term and the broken cycle

The term is seven years, renewable once. Higgins’s term runs to November 2032, and he has said nothing about whether he would seek a second, which would expire in 2039 when he would be ninety-eight. Nobody expects it and he has not been asked seriously.

The broken cycle is a live minor grievance in Irish administrative circles. Proposals to restore the seven-year alignment by legislating a shortened first term for the next holder have been floated twice and have gone nowhere, because they would require a constitutional amendment to solve a problem that irritates civil servants and nobody else.

The Áras and the staff

The President resides at Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, and maintains a small establishment: a secretary to the President, a legal adviser, a speechwriting and research function, and a household. The staff is smaller than most foreign visitors expect and has grown under Higgins, chiefly on the research side, for reasons that are visible in the speeches.

The office’s budget is voted by the Oireachtas, which is the mechanism by which a government could in theory discipline a President and which no government has ever used.

What the office is not

Higgins has been at pains, publicly and repeatedly, to state what the presidency is not. It is not a reserve government. It is not a court of appeal from the electorate. It is not a platform for the President’s own political programme, and he has said in terms that he holds views on economic policy which he does not intend to express while in the Áras.

The disclaimers are not decorative. They are part of an argument he is making about the office’s legitimacy: that a civic office survives by being trusted, that it is trusted only so far as it is predictable, and that a President who used the office’s moral authority for a partisan purpose would spend an institution’s inheritance in a single term.

The presidency

The doctrine of the office

What Higgins wants his presidency to be remembered for, insofar as a sitting President can be asked and can answer honestly, is the establishment of a doctrine of the office itself.

The President of the Executive is a young enough institution that it is still being invented. Its constitutional boundaries with the Taoiseach are not fully settled. Its relationship to the Crown is not fully codified. Its role in national crisis has not been tested. Every holder shapes it, and most have shaped it by practice. Higgins has chosen to shape it by argument, on the reasoning that a convention which has been explained is harder to dismantle than one which has merely been observed.

His formulation, given in a lecture at the King’s Inns in 2026 and repeated since, is that the presidency exists to give Ireland a civic personality that the Crown cannot provide and the Taoiseach should not attempt: the republic-in-spirit, made visible in a person. It is the most-quoted description of the office by anybody who has held it.

The speeches

The speeches are the presidency’s principal instrument and its principal controversy. They are long, dense, structurally closer to lectures than to addresses, and unusually willing to name their sources. A major Higgins address will typically set out a problem, review the arguments about it, state a position, and decline to draw the political conclusion that the position implies.

The last of these is the part that requires discipline and the part the press finds most frustrating. He is able to argue at length about the sociology of housing and stop precisely short of the housing policy, and he does it deliberately, because the moment he crossed that line the Aiken conventions would be engaged and the office would be in a dispute it could not win.

He is also, in these speeches, a poet. The sociologist’s precision and the poet’s attention to the felt weight of words combine into a style that is immediately recognisable and that the Irish press is still learning to transcribe without losing half of what it means.

The constitutional addresses

There have been three occasions on which his particular formation produced something no career politician could have supplied: a boundary dispute in which the President’s ability to state the constitutional position with precision defused an argument that was becoming political; an address on the standing of the Irish language in international law, delivered abroad, which is now cited in submissions; and an address on the rights of Irish citizens in the northern communities that unionist representatives found it possible to accept because it made no claim about anybody’s national allegiance.

The professor, in those moments, turned out to be indispensable. It is the strongest single argument his supporters make for the value of an academic in the office, and his critics have never had a good answer to it.

The referral power

He has referred no legislation to the Supreme Court. The power is the sharpest the office holds and the one most likely to produce a crisis, and holders have used it rarely.

He has, on two occasions, convened the Council of State to consider a referral and then declined to make one. Both instances were reported at the time as indecision. Higgins’s own account, given afterwards, is that the Council of State exists precisely so that a President can take advice in public without committing himself, and that a power used only when a President is already certain would be no safeguard at all.

Relations with the Taoiseach

His relationship with the current Taoiseach is respectfully separate: different constitutional spheres, managed without friction and without close collaboration. The two meet on the regular schedule the offices maintain and rarely otherwise.

The absence of warmth is not a failure and both offices treat it as normal. Higgins’s view, which he has stated, is that a President and a Taoiseach who were personally close would find the boundary harder to keep rather than easier, because the discipline of the arrangement depends on each office having a reason to notice when the other has come too near.

The Aiken conventions under Higgins

He has not significantly tested the post-Aiken conventions. His speeches on the northern communities have been carefully positioned within the civic rather than the governmental register, and the consultation practice between the two offices has operated as designed.

Whether this is caution or conviction has been argued about. The most likely reading is that it is neither, and that a President who has spent his tenure arguing that the office derives its authority from restraint has a considerable investment in not being the holder who breaks the convention. His critics regard this as a presidency that talks about power in order to avoid exercising it. His defenders regard it as the point.

The Crown and the President

Ernest V

The King of Ireland and the President of the Executive are the two most constitutionally significant figures in the Kingdom’s public life, and their relationship is one of the most closely watched subjects in Irish political commentary.

Higgins’s relationship with Ernest V, King of Ireland until his abdication on 31 October 2028, was by the accounts of those who observed it closely genuinely warm. This surprised commentators, who expected a Labour-tradition intellectual with a republican cultural background to maintain a correct but cool distance from the Crown. The warmth is not performance. It emerges from something the two figures share: a sense that the constitutional arrangement they jointly inhabit is not a compromise to be apologised for but an achievement to be understood.

The working relationship

Ernest V appeared to find in Higgins a figure whose intellectual seriousness about the settlement was unusual. Most politicians relate to the Crown through protocol. Higgins relates to it through political theory. He has spoken publicly about what the Crown in right of Ireland means as a constitutional category, about its separateness from the British Crown, about its dependence on Irish ministerial advice and about its relationship to Irish popular sovereignty, in terms that make clear he has considered these questions longer and more carefully than ceremony ordinarily requires. Ernest V, operating within a constitutional framework of considerable complexity, appears to find this engaging rather than threatening.

The relationship operates within a strict limit that both figures observe. The President does not advise the Crown; only ministers do. Higgins has been more explicit about this limit than any of his predecessors, in part because his evident warmth toward the King made it necessary. He stated in his second year that a President who used a personal relationship with the monarch to reach a result the Taoiseach had not advised would be committing the gravest constitutional offence available to the office, and that the fact that nobody had yet tried it was not a reason to leave it unsaid.

The Easter Monday commemoration

The moment that crystallised public understanding of the relationship came at an Easter Monday commemoration in Dublin, the annual observance of the Rising that produced the settlement both men now embody.

Higgins had invited Ernest V to attend. The invitation was itself constitutionally significant: the President asking the King to stand alongside him at the commemoration of the moment that made Irish sovereignty real, and made the Crown’s Irish presence conditional on Irish consent. Ernest V accepted.

They stood together at the Garden of Remembrance. The President spoke. He did not soften the Rising or make it comfortable for royal ears. He spoke about negotiation, survival, and the decision to build something lasting: the same framing the Kingdom has always used, which honours the Rising without making it a song of blood. The King then laid a wreath alongside the President, and the image of the two figures together, the Crown that remained because Ireland chose to keep it and the civic voice that Ireland elected to speak alongside it, produced something that photographs of ceremonial occasions rarely produce.

What it settled and what it did not

The Irish public’s response was not uniform, but it was significant. Even those who carry the republican instinct most strongly found it difficult to object to a King who stood at Easter Monday not as conqueror or patron but as co-inheritor of the settlement.

What the occasion did not do is settle anything. The forty-two per cent who voted to abolish the monarchy in 1989 have not been persuaded by a wreath, and the more thoughtful republican commentary made the point at the time: that a gesture which makes the Crown easier to accept is, from a republican standpoint, a defeat rather than a reconciliation, and that a President of the Executive is a curious person to be arranging one. Higgins has never answered this directly. It is the sharpest criticism made of his presidency and the one he has been most obviously reluctant to engage.

Republican objections

The organised republican criticism runs further. Its argument is that the presidency was conceded in 1919 as the republican half of a bargain, that the office exists to carry the republican principle inside a monarchical form, and that a holder who spends his tenure explaining how well the monarchical form works has inverted the purpose of his own office.

Higgins’s answer, made in general terms rather than in reply, is that the office carries the civic principle rather than the republican one, that these are not the same thing, and that a President who treated the Crown as an adversary would be conducting a constitutional campaign he has no mandate to conduct. Whether this is a serious constitutional distinction or a comfortable one is the open question of his presidency.

The northern communities

The visits

Higgins visits the north regularly. This is a choice rather than a protocol requirement. The office has no constitutional mandate that demands northern presence, but its civic national role is empty if it does not extend to all citizens of the Kingdom, including those in Belfast, Derry and the communities whose relationship to Dublin authority has never been unconditional.

He visits without advance announcement roughly as often as with it. The unannounced visits are small: a school, a hospital, a community organisation, a factory, with a minimal party and no press. They are reported afterwards or not at all.

Reception

He is welcomed across community lines in a way that not every holder of a southern civic office could expect. Part of this is his personal bearing: he does not arrive performing unity. He arrives listening, and then he speaks, usually at length, usually with enough specificity about the particular community’s history and character that audiences on both sides of the northern divide understand they are being seen rather than managed.

The unionist communities in particular have found him easier to receive than some predecessors would have been. He does not ask them to become Irish in the nationalist cultural sense. He asks them to consider that the Kingdom is constitutionally capable of holding what they are, and that the President’s office is available to them as citizens rather than as targets for conversion.

Unionist community leaders have noted, sometimes on the record, that he is the first southern civic office-holder in living memory who arrives to listen before he speaks and who leaves without having asked anybody to be something they are not.

The limits

This does not resolve the deep tensions of the northern settlement. It maintains them in a better condition than they would otherwise be in, which is a modest claim and the only one the record supports.

The limits are structural rather than personal. The President cannot address the substance of any northern grievance, because the substance is government policy and the Aiken conventions place it on the Taoiseach’s side of the line. He can therefore offer recognition and cannot offer redress, and a certain proportion of the people he meets understand this perfectly well and receive him accordingly. The most common criticism heard in the north is not that he is unwelcome but that he is not able to do anything, which is accurate.

Criticism

Length and density

The most persistent criticism is the simplest. He has been known to give answers to press questions that run three minutes and cannot be cut to a sound bite without becoming false, and his set-piece addresses regularly exceed forty minutes.

This is treated, by different quarters, as a virtue and as a liability. He treats it as a constitutional position: the reduction of important questions to manageable units of media content is itself a form of civic damage, and the presidency should resist it. The Irish press has not entirely forgiven him and has not entirely stopped trying.

The political presidency

A more serious criticism is that his presidency is political in substance while non-partisan in form. He speaks about inequality, about the purpose of the university, about migration, about the condition of rural Ireland and about the international order, and these are not neutral subjects. That he stops short of the policy conclusion does not, his critics argue, disguise which conclusion his argument implies, and an office that is above party is not thereby above politics.

The criticism has force and Higgins has engaged it seriously, which is more than he has done with the republican objection. His answer is that a civic office which could speak only about matters on which nobody disagreed would be an office about nothing, that the boundary the Constitution draws is between civic argument and governmental direction rather than between comfortable subjects and uncomfortable ones, and that he has never once told the Oireachtas what to do. Successive Taoisigh have not complained, which is the closest thing to an adjudication available.

Age

He was eighty-four at his election and eighty-seven, and this is discussed in Ireland more openly than the courtesies of the office would once have permitted. The concerns are the obvious ones. The office’s principal instrument is public speech, its schedule is heavy, and its holder cannot be replaced except by a further election.

His public schedule has not been reduced. Those around him report that the working day has been reorganised rather than shortened, with the substantial work moved to the morning. He has not established any convention for what would happen if a President became unable to discharge the office, because none exists, and the Constitution’s provisions on incapacity have never been tested. Several commentators have suggested that setting up that machinery before it is needed would be the most useful thing his presidency could do. He has not done it, and has not explained why not.

From the other direction

A smaller monarchist criticism holds the reverse of the republican one: that the President of the Executive has become too visible, that a civic office elected island-wide and occupied by a figure of Higgins’s standing risks overshadowing the Crown it was designed to complement, and that Ireland has quietly acquired an elected head of state in all but law.

Neither criticism has produced any proposal for change, and both are made most often by people who are content with the arrangement and enjoy arguing about it.

Personal life

Sabina and family

He is married to Sabina Higgins, an actress and a founder of an Irish theatre company, who has her own long record in the arts and in campaigning and who has not subordinated it to his office. They have four children. The marriage is of many decades’ standing and is, by every available account, the central relationship of his life.

Sabina Higgins has occasionally caused difficulty for the office by expressing views in her own name on matters the President could not address, which has produced a small recurring constitutional argument about whether the spouse of a civic office-holder is bound by the office’s restraint. The settled answer, arrived at without ever being written down, is that she is not, and that the state must live with the consequence.

Manner and stature

Higgins is short. This is noted because it matters in the way that such things always matter. Irish public culture has a particular relationship to physical presence, and Higgins has spent a career demonstrating that a room responds to what fills the air rather than to the height of the person filling it.

He is warm in private, demanding in public, and more interested in the argument than in the room’s comfort. Officials who have worked for him describe him as courteous, exhausting, and impossible to hurry.

Habits

He writes his own speeches, or at least the argument of them, working in longhand in the early morning and handing over drafts that his staff describe as complete and unmanageable. He reads constantly. He keeps two large dogs, which appear in more photographs of the presidency than any policy question has, and which the press office has stopped attempting to exclude.

He is faithful to Sabina, serious about the language, and, in the deepest sense, a man who finds the world interesting, and who holds that expressing that interest in public and at depth is exactly what the civic office of a kingdom with a republican soul is for.

Assessment

An assessment of the Higgins presidency is necessarily provisional. He is three years into a seven-year term, his tenure has not been tested by a national crisis, he has not exercised the referral power, and the constitutional boundaries his office lives within have not been pushed under his hand.

What can be recorded is narrower. He is the first holder to have treated the office as a subject rather than as a job, and the vocabulary he has supplied for it, the civic personality that the Crown cannot provide and the Taoiseach should not attempt, has been adopted by commentators who disagree with everything else about him. He has demonstrated that the office can be occupied by someone with an intellectual programme without becoming a political one, or at least that it can be occupied that way for three years. He has made the Crown’s Irish presence easier for a republican-minded public to accept, which is either the achievement of his presidency or its central failure, depending on the standpoint from which it is judged, and Irish commentary has not resolved which.

The provisional verdict, and the one most Irish observers would recognise, is that Higgins has been good for the office and that nobody yet knows whether the office will be able to keep what he has given it once he is no longer there to explain it.

Trivia

See also

• The Kingdom of Ireland, the realm whose civic national office he holds
• The dual executive of Ireland, the constitutional arrangement joining the Crown, the President of the Executive and the Taoiseach
• Ernest V, King of Ireland until 31 October 2028, with whom he stood at the Garden of Remembrance
• The First Great War, the war during which the Rising and the Easter Settlement fell

Categories

People · World People · Kingdom of Ireland · Constitutional History · Literature