'President’s foreign policy statements are utterly reckless'

Below is an article written by Stephen Collins in The Irish Times yesterday.

Collins makes valid points about President Michael D Higgins breaching constitutional convention. Indeed was it appropriate for President Higgins to speak about Pope Francis as he did after his meeting with him on Thursday in Rome?

It may be a trivial issue in the midst of the crisis now gripping the Middle East, but President Michael D Higgins has once again breached constitutional convention and demeaned his office with his attack on the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Whether his description of von der Leyen’s support for Israel as “thoughtless and even reckless” in the wake of the Hamas massacre is justified is not the point. As President he has no right to make big foreign policy pronouncements and it is reckless of him to do so.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was also critical of von der Leyen’s intervention, but that is his prerogative as the head of government. It is certainly not the role of the Irish President to usurp the government’s function, particularly in the midst of an international crisis.

If the world was not in such a dangerous place, it might be amusing that the President saw no irony in his criticism of von der Leyen for exceeding her remit when he was doing the very same thing himself; stepping far outside his constitutional role as he has done repeatedly since taking office.

The President’s intervention came as the Government attempted to walk a fine line between articulating the horror most Irish people feel at the massacre of 1,400 Israelis while insisting that the response to that attack should be in accordance with international law.

Appropriate reaction

It is the job of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, to devise the appropriate reaction to such an international crisis, and both have stressed the need for a proportionate response from Israel. The President simply has no role to play in the matter.

The situation has only got more dangerous since the terrible loss of life at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza city where more than 500 people are thought to have lost their lives. At the time of writing, it is not yet clear who was responsible but President Biden on his visit to the Middle East suggested it was the “other team, not [Israel]”. The Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.

Tánaiste Micheál Martin said Biden may have access to more information and intelligence than he would but he rightly urged caution in attributing blame. “It is very difficult for us at this distance to make any judgment call for who was responsible for this.”

Biden’s visit to Israel was clearly designed to show solidarity with a country that has suffered a terrible loss, but he also encouraged the Israeli government to pull back from a full-scale invasion. His advice not to repeat the rage-filled reaction of the United States after 9/11 was unambiguous.

The slaughter carried out by Hamas was clearly designed to provoke a reaction that would inflame the entire Middle East. A wiser leader than Netanyahu would recognise the long-term interests of his country and demand a considered response rather than immediate and terrible revenge.

As for President Higgins, his latest intervention in politics comes hot on the heels of his recent denunciation of the United Nations for its failure to prevent war and famine. How the UN is supposed to perform those feats he didn’t say. Not long before that he waded into the neutrality debate, using pejorative language to claim that the Government is trying “to crawl away” from “the self-esteem of our foreign policy” and making unpleasant comments about the chair of the Forum on Neutrality, Prof Louise Richardson, for which he subsequently apologised.

From early in his first term President Higgins has pushed the boundaries of his office, making speeches critical of the direction being taken by the EU and expressing thinly veiled criticism of the Irish economic model. He went so far as to intervene on the eve of the last general election campaign by making comments on taxation policy.

It is one thing to have a President exceeding his powers in domestic politics, but his interventions in the area of foreign policy are even more inappropriate and have the capacity to do long-term damage to the country’s interests and its standing in the world.

The Government has understandably shown a deep reluctance to get involved in a public dispute with the President or even attempt to rein him in. There is a long-standing convention that politicians never express criticism of the President, who is deemed to be above politics. But what is a government to do if the President has no qualms about flouting the convention that he should not comment on current political issues? While it might not be popular to do so, the government of the day has a duty to uphold the Constitution in the long-term interests of the country.

The great achievement of this State since independence a century ago has been the survival of democracy. That has happened because our politicians have operated within a clear constitutional framework. Democracy is a fragile flower that needs to be protected by strict adherence to constitutional norms. A President repeatedly flouting the rules is not a good omen.