Former president Michael D Higgins has termed a climate of prevailing “anti-intellectualism” as a threat to the world, urging people to question “the most outrageous abuses of human rights, language, and basic ethics”.
Speaking at the Other Voices festival in Dingle, Co Kerry, on Friday, he referenced US president Donald Trump’s comments to a female journalist at a recent media conference as an example of disrespect for any challenge to current orthodoxy.
“How can you address a woman in [the media] profession as ‘Piggy?’” he said. “I think that if people are not willing to accept basic principles of courtesy that are there to enable discourse, you are moving into the realm of hatred and it is at its roots racist.”
In a wide-ranging interview with presenter Annie Macmanus covering topics from climate change, Gaza and Sudan to the collapse of development funding in Africa, he said it was wrong to say that people must not question the status quo in this “very dark period”.
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Mr Higgins later told The Irish Times that Ireland was taking the wrong approach to the immigration debate.
“We have started in the wrong place about migration. How, for example, would it not be better for people in their consciousness to have a set of maps of places on the planet that have been destroyed forever by the effects of climate change? I would say they could live with that,” he said.
“But then, would they be able to ask: ‘What assumptions brought us to this point and how do we go to a new place?’
“I see that President Trump refers to the ‘Third World.’ I think he had better realise that the people he’s talking about are the future world and they will believe in universalism in a way that he strongly opposes, and they will make new international institutions that he has destroyed with a respect for international law that he does not have.
“The sooner the majority of the world is represented in the decisions that affect all future generations, the safer our planet will be.”
The former president opened this year’s festival at St James’s Church, promoting the release of an extended edition of an album of his poetry, Against All Certainty, which features musical accompaniment by Myles O’Reilly.
