Long before he became president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins had a column in Hot Press. The magazine was beginning to tilt towards current affairs alongside its traditional music coverage and Higgins became a columnist for it in 1983 while a senator, having lost his Dáil seat of Galway West the year before. He regained the seat in 1987 but gave up the column in 1993 upon becoming minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht.
Now, a selection has been collected and republished by Hot Press, complete with effusive introduction and useful “scene-setting” by its long-serving editor Niall Stokes. Anthologies such as this usually appear once the author has acquired some later distinction; it’s fair to say that Higgins is more popular as a head of state than he was as an avowedly left-wing politician.
For those inclined to read history backwards, there is certainly consistency in some of the positions revealed here and those Higgins has expressed in later life. But these articles were written at certain moments in time, before Higgins became a government minister, head of state and, in some quarters at least, national treasure. Are they still worth reading? The short answer is yes, with minor quibbles.
The collection, topped and tailed with Higgins’s first and last columns for the magazine, is arranged chronologically, with each getting a short, if occasionally meandering, introduction by Stokes along with a thumbnail of the cover of the issue each column appeared in. Many of the big-ticket issues one would expect to meet in an account of 1980s Ireland are here, such as the campaigns against the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and to legalise divorce, opposition to US foreign policy in Latin America intertwined with President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit, and the Enniskillen bombing, among others.
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It is a diverse selection that avoids a soap-opera approach to Ireland’s politics in this era. Perhaps surprisingly for an Irish politician, Higgins didn’t bring Galway into the column until 1985 and even this became an unflattering discussion of Galwegian links to the slave economies of the early modern Atlantic world. Those sceptical of the intertwining of politics and the arts with which Higgins is often associated would do well to read his own take on the matter from March 1991, where he at least makes a case for it.
[ Michael D Higgins speaks out against Nicaragua’s ‘departure from human rights’Opens in new window ]
Many of the columns deal with international as well as domestic issues, including lucid and sober accounts of Higgins’s travels to parts of the world that his political roles and interest in human rights and development aid brought him to: numerous countries in Africa and Latin America and, perhaps most strikingly from the perspective of the present, Gaza and the West Bank. This is best seen not as foresight, so much as an interest in issues that were unresolved then just as they are now.
Something similar can be said for his critiques of patriarchy and latter-day landlordism in Ireland (among other things), which evince a gut sympathy for the poor and the marginalised at home as well as abroad. He had a good eye for hypocrisy on the part of church, state and commentariat and, given his own convictions, Higgins wasn’t shy of criticising opponents such as Fine Gael’s famously conservative Alice Glenn (though he could also acknowledge those political or ideological opponents whom he respected).
At times the columns are slightly over-written but they are, for the most part, clear and very readable pieces of commentary and reportage, inevitably rooted in their time and place. This is the book’s strength but it also leads to a weakness. It offers, often vividly, one politician’s perspective on Ireland and the world, written for an audience who would probably have been reasonably familiar with much of what Higgins was writing about.
As collated in this edition, however, a little too much is left unexplained or unidentified in passing, which may well leave readers born after Higgins’s column ended in 1993 scratching their heads at times (a reference from 1989 to The Quays bar as the “capital of alternative Galway” is certainly of its time). One shouldn’t always have to Google it. Stokes’s brief commentaries go some way to adding context but even some footnotes to make events and individuals more explicable would have helped.
That said, and regardless of what became of the author, this is a diverse collection of journalism that offers a lively road trip through the 1980s and early 1990s as seen from what was then the contemporary left of Ireland’s political spectrum. Despite the somewhat hackneyed title these were, in their time, very much the minority reports, but they make up a valuable strand of commentary that helps to illuminate a decade’s worth of recent history. Definitely worth reading; all royalties being donated to Trócaire.
John Gibney is assistant editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy programme.
