We have much to be grateful for in Michael D Higgins as President of Ireland. At times, he can be frustrating but mostly Higgins has acted with great dignity and eloquence, often performing a role as nation’s conscience.
An Uachtarán reflects the best of us and the core decency of being Irish. When his term ends later this year, it’s likely there will be an undignified and brutal campaign to find a successor.
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On becoming President, he said: “I love our shared island, our shared Ireland”.
Some commentators seem to struggle with the concept of a ‘shared island’ and ‘shared Ireland’ but it’s an inescapable reality that the ground we inhabit is shared.
Despite advanced age, the President speaks with great clarity and a freshness, which appears to be lost on some consumed and trapped in outdated, redundant and narrow nationalist rhetoric more suited to 1955 than 2025.
Read more: Ireland stands behind its principled and measured president - The Irish News view
In his inaugural address, invoking James Connolly, Higgins said: “Ireland is a country still to be fully imagined and invented.” He has never been prescriptive about the future as he said the same address: “Every age, after all, must have its own ‘aisling’, a dream of a better, kinder, happier shared world.”
The current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, gets the concept of shared space and reconciliation, but has gone further than all his predecessors by putting meat on its bones through his project, the Shared Island Initiative.
Criticism of Martin’s commitment to unification is loaded with bias by those who are hung up on a coarse one-size-fits-all formula for achieving Irish unity.
Irish unity will come when the time is right. It can’t be forced, coerced or wished into being. Peace walls have yet to come down, both those which are physical and those which are trapped in tribal mindsets
Paying lip service towards unionism and British identity in Northern Ireland is patronising. Martin on the other hand, is building towards unity one brick at a time, winning hearts and minds, being non-threatening and pragmatic, supporting projects, people and communities by making meaningful investments in projects which matter and make a difference.
The Taoiseach’s ‘aisling’ is one which people north and south can buy into because they can touch, feel and see it taking shape in real time. Anything else is little more than a glorified talking shop.
There’s little doubt that my own political outlook has been very much framed by my family history, constitutional politics, John Hume and Seamus Mallon. “A shared home place,” as Mallon called it where citizens - unionist, nationalist and new communities - are reconciled with and to each other and are comfortable in their own skins.
This led to my 25-year involvement with the credit union movement and five years’ service on the first inclusive Policing Board.
Irish unity will come when the time is right. It can’t be forced, coerced or wished into being. Peace walls have yet to come down, both those which are physical and those which are trapped in tribal mindsets.
John Hume identified areas of cooperation in a keynote speech to the European Parliament nearly 40 years ago; energy, agriculture, tourism, transport and education. Today one could add the need for cross-border healthcare.
The Good Friday Agreement and the institutions which flow from it have been falling short in delivery and by a lack of commitment to them from various politicians responsible for these core areas of mutual concern.
It is time to turbocharge all aspects of the Good Friday Agreement. The scourge of intolerance has spread from being just purely sectarian to being anti-immigrant and intimidatory towards new communities and cultures both in the north and south.
But let’s be brutally honest: sectarianism was never been properly addressed or faced down. The blame for this lies wholly at the door of the Northern Ireland Executive and the failure to have a proper community relations strategy in place.
Get the act together on the outstanding but pressing areas of mutual concern, end divisions - but not difference - and we will, in the words of President Higgins, “with determination move into our common, shared, different future”.
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