President Michael D Higgins of Ireland is a most delightful man – cultured, intelligent and compassionate. Often known simply as ‘Michael D’ He is also a poet and, like most people in Ireland, quite a character. If you haven’t seen the wonderful take-off of his state visit to Britain, you will enjoy this
President Higgins on State Visit to Britain
Meanwhile he has been musing on the future after Covid with Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times. But first you get a sense of how he deals with the relative isolation of these times in his official residence in the Phoenix Park in Dublin
“I go out with my dog,” he says via Zoom, “and I walk around the periphery here. I see people at the other side of the ha-ha at the edge of the Áras, and we discuss dogs at a much exaggerated social distancing.”
The question which absorbs many of us at the moment is how life is going to be when the pandemic crisis eventually comes to an end. In particular we wonder how we can avoid a repetition of what happened after the financial crash of 2008 where basically we bailed out the banks and life continued pretty much as before..
I find myself constantly wondering how we can understand better the flaws in our society which have been ruthlessly exposed by Covid – where wealth and social class have greatly affected risk and where BAME communities have been disproportionately affected. If the government in London does ultimately concede the enquiry which is so badly needed, we may have a chance of finding out. The worst thing will be for us just to pick up and be delighted that we can carry on ‘as normal’. To some extent, we will all do that – socialising and maybe even beginning to travel again – but we owe it to those who have suffered so much to do much more.
President Higgins, who used to be a Labour politician in Ireland, says that there is a real challenge to the ‘ever-smaller government’ mindset:
“The notion was that the state should be small, where it was tolerated at all, but here we are now, where, at the global level, we can’t possibly respond to the challenge of climate change without the state. And now with the pandemic – again it is the state.”
The theorists of minimal government, he suggests, “have all run to the hills but they’re not gone away. They are in the bushes. They will re-emerge on an argument about the deficit. There is no way you can handle the state deficits that are built up in responding to Covid and say it can be done in that [old] model.”