Heather Humphreys says the first visitor she will invite to Áras an Uachtaráin if she is elected president will be Michael D Higgins because “he is a very learned and very wise man and I really think that he could certainly give me some very good advice”. What a very odd thing for her to say. If the Fine Gael candidate believes her own campaign’s scare-theory that Catherine Connolly is unfit to be president because she criticises the EU, it must follow by the same rationale that Higgins should never have been allowed to set foot inside the Áras. For Ireland’s outgoing president has been one of the loudest EU-critical voices on the national and international stage.
Upbraiding the EU has been a regular theme of the Higgins presidency, yet nobody in Government would dare accuse him of being an enemy of the bloc. In 2013, he rebuked EU leaders for lumping citizens with banking debts and austerity measures. In 2016, he accused them of “ditching” some of their better social cohesion achievements. In 2019, he claimed the EU’s macroeconomic policy framework “pits creditor against debtor and those with trade surpluses against those without”. In 2023, he said Ursula von der Leyen was not speaking for Ireland when she declared that “Europe stands with Israel” after Israel commenced its campaign of mass human slaughter in Gaza. Two months ago, he said the EU had suffered reputational damage from its “lethargic response” to that horror.
Connolly has also berated the EU’s apathy at the genocide and, unlike the political establishment now ganging up on her, she has not been afraid to condemn the role of the United States as Israel’s principal facilitator and weapons supplier. The flaw in her candidacy is her inability to explain her position succinctly and unambiguously. Thus she has herself to blame for letting her detractors depict her as swimming with the loony left when she bluntly says France and Britain cannot be trusted or that contemporary Germany’s arming-up evokes Hitler’s 1939. There are valid concerns to be raised about those countries’ arms industries but, stubbornly, she insists in this age of instant news and quickfire questioning that she be given time to contextualise and reflect. She will have plenty of time for crafting considered speeches if she makes it to the Áras.
The incumbent has a similar propensity for long-windedness but his painstaking orations over the past 14 years have benefited from the luxury of having time to contextualise and reflect, as he pored over his presidential scripts. Higgins’s critiques of the EU have been wider-ranging than Connolly’s but Government Buildings never dared risk alienating his legions of fans by telling him to zip it.
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Being EU-critical does not make one EU-phobic. Fianna Fáil tacitly acknowledged as much when it selected Mary McAleese as its presidential candidate in 1997, after she had been one of the most prominent campaigners against the bloc’s Single European Act. On the contrary, informed criticism indicates a deeper level of contemplation about the union than is displayed by many of the nodding dogs traipsing through the Tá lobby in Leinster House. Constantly intoning “I’m a good European” does not make you one.
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Connolly’s admission that she voted against the two referendums on the Lisbon Treaty and the other two on the Nice Treaty is being proffered as further evidence of her supposed antipathy to the EU. But which would you prefer – someone who cares enough to study and parse it, or somebody who couldn’t be bothered? During the campaign for the first Lisbon referendum in 2008, then taoiseach Brian Cowen and his party colleague EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy both confessed they had not read from “cover to cover” the treaty they were urging the electorate to approve. The people rejected it. Even in the second referendum, nearly one in three voters said No again. That hardly makes Connolly’s anti vote exceptional.
The debate about Europe is critical to Ireland’s neutrality and defence policies. Turning a blind eye to Europe’s increasing militarisation will not make its encroachment go away. We are not hapless guests in Fawlty Towers with the proprietor warning everyone “don’t mention the war”. There are 60,733 new voters on the register for next week’s election. The number roughly equates to the “more than 60,000” who, according to the Electoral Commission, have turned 18 since last year’s general election. Those voters were freshly embarked on their teenage years when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. They have borne witness to the savagery perpetrated in Gaza for the past two years. Many of them have joined the peace protests. For their generation, war is not theoretical. It is real.
Ireland’s neutrality is skidding along an obstacle course. Years of defence underspending compounded by drone and cyber technologies have exposed the country to increased external threat. Russian naval ships skulk off its Atlantic coast where three-quarters of the northern hemisphere’s communications cables lie on the bottom of the ocean. US soldiers and arms shipments transit Shannon Airport. The Government is unravelling the 65-year-old triple lock – abandoning the requirement for Defence Forces missions to have UN Security Council mandates, and increasing from 12 to 50 the number of troops who may be deployed without a Dáil vote.
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As it turned out, and despite the political platitudes, the Lisbon Treaty did have consequences for Ireland’s definition of its neutrality. It spawned the EU’s PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation), what then commission president Jean-Claude Juncker called “the Lisbon Treaty’s sleeping beauty”. Ireland signed up to PESCO in 2017. Malta opted out to safeguard its neutrality. As well as increasing military co-operation, it seeks to enhance the defence industry of member states, creating EU jobs. Now Washington is bullying Europe into buying more arms from US manufacturers and Donald Trump is threatening to impose additional tariffs on Spain for refusing to increase its military spending.
The squeeze is relentless. The demarcation line between neutrality and alliance with Nato armies grows thinner. Against this bubbling background, it has been reassuring over the past 14 years to know that our president in the Park was keeping his beady eye on Brussels.
