The absolute best case this republican can make for monarchy can be found in the Áras, flanked by Bernese Mountain Dogs. For my entire adult life, and then some, Michael D Higgins has been President.
I don’t much want Ireland to have a king. But I wonder if I would prefer that over having an elected head of state who acts like one anyway – bending the shape and contours of the office to his whims, professing to the world on behalf of the nation as though he speaks for us all.
Irish foreign policy is in a strange place right now. We are, as has long been the case, totally impotent on matters of global politics – with no real army to speak of, outside of Nato, militaristically neutral and never even close the so-called grown-ups table when the future of Europe is at stake. (Did that invite to the White House with Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Rutte get lost in the post?)
But simultaneously, there are plenty of members of the Irish establishment who – in full cognisance of this basic reality – believe that the world is somehow willing to listen to Ireland’s lectures on affairs of international morality.
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I invite these people to listen, in turn, to conversations about Ireland away from their perch as the self-appointed ethical sherpas of Europe. I suspect they will not be surprised to hear that their statements – if even heard in the first place – are treated with little more than patronising mirth.
When President Higgins called Nato’s plea for increased defence spending “appalling”, Europe looked on with gentle confusion that this oh-so European nation could be oh-so out of step with its European colleagues.
The few outside of the country who noticed the hand-wringing debate about Ireland’s triple-lock (seen as vital to shoring up neutrality) considered the whole thing rather trifle, not least when the Baltics are consumed by existential panic and Germany is redrawing its fiscal rules to accommodate hikes in defence spending.
Micheál Martin’s professional equivocation on the topic – just because we are militaristically neutral, it doesn’t mean we are politically neutral – doesn’t grate in Brussels or London. It just looks unimportant.
And we all look blissfully unaware of the anxieties on the Continent; failing to do our bit as a strategic outpost on Europe’s northwestern frontier. No one is really angry, rather they don’t really care. And so Ireland can trade off of ambient goodwill for now, but it cannot trade off of status or influence any more. When Europe is at war it simply doesn’t have any.
Which brings me back to the Áras and the type of person we might want to replace Mr Higgins. It is my view that the place has been subject to deplorably undergrad politics for long enough now and that it needn’t endure much more.
And so I am anxious to learn that Catherine Connolly is a contender of relative significance. She has recently said Irish people should resist a “trend towards imperialism” in the European Union, as the bloc is becoming “increasingly militarised under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen and the European People’s Party”; that the EU has “lost its moral compass”; and that “the US, England and France are deeply entrenched in an arms industry which causes bloodshed across the world”.
This is all of a piece with the Irish peacenik leftist tradition. And plenty of it is perfectly defensible, if unsophisticated.
But there are a few things to give me pause: first, we should not allow reasonable scepticism about the EU to spill into total naivety about how we could cope without it (we couldn’t cope much at all); second, at a time when our own security is dependent on that of our neighbours, it is perhaps unwise to launch broadsides at them; and I do wonder if it makes us all look a bit dim-witted to baulk at the mainland as it “militarises” when there is a serious attritional war happening on its eastern frontier.
But more than any of that, the problem is that Ireland is turning itself into a lecturer on the world stage, the finger-wagger in chief.
And on what credentials? Ireland has not earned many bragging rights when it comes to its history of defending Europe against malign interlopers. Its own legacy in imperial adventure – look to India – is not clean.
By luck of geography Ireland needn’t feel so immediately worried as, say, Estonia. But as a small country on Europe’s frontier, ought it not display a touch more sympathy for an anxious Estonian right now? Is that not, after all, what the bloc is all about?
But if Connolly really is holding a mirror to Ireland, representative of the electorate’s beliefs about the world, then that is okay. But in cleaving to that world view Ireland must accept what that really means for its future – not as the world’s moral compass but as its worthy lecturer. Except this time? Not many will be listening.
