News & Events Professor O’Connell Delivers Citation for the John B. Keane Lifetime Achievement Award for President Michael D. Higgins

There is a delightful irony, that would not be lost on the Listowel man in whose name this award is being presented, in a President being conferred with an honour in a kingdom, a kingdom at the south-western tip of a republic in which he presides as primus inter pares, or first among equals. The President and his wife have come to liberate The Kingdom…and they brought their army! 

The sociological insight so powerfully evident in the work of John B. Keane – what John Hewitt would call knowing your ‘corner in the 2 universe’ – chimes resonantly with the writing – academic, journalistic and poetic – of President Higgins. Both wrote with courage and penetrating truthfulness. Both railed against literary and academic distortions of peasantry by extoling a liberation of mind and heart. Both saw the telling of stories – especially women’s stories – overlaid by euphemism, silence and shame, as a form of what Rebecca Anne Barr calls ‘radical vulnerability’. Both knew and respected their diverse audiences well. 

…… 

The world is full of good and bad ideas. Ideas are all that some people have – we dream, we hope, we imagine, we plan. We think before we act. 

Ideas sustain us, but some ideas defeat us. 

When Michael D. Higgins entered the office of President of Ireland in November 2011, he promised ‘a presidency of ideas’. 

This made sense for an office in which the office-holder is required to dedicate their abilities to the service and welfare of the people, an elected office situated at the apex of the Oireachtas within the constitutional superstructure, neither executive nor judicial. 

But it also made sense for that particular office-holder whose life as a sociologist, politician, teacher, writer, public intellectual and poet was all about ideas and their transformative, emancipatory power. 

Therefore, the aphorism about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose is entirely irrelevant to the Irish presidency, not because our President happens to write poetry and prose, but because a President does not govern. 

And how audacious were we – the People – to elect … and re-elect… a President whose ideas seem, for some, to represent impermissible iconoclasm, people who view his every second utterance as some kind of constitutional trespass, people for whom the Constitution represents a boundary map of domains separated by bright lines, a procedural map and not a field of dreams. 

It should not be forgotten that the core animating principle of popular sovereignty at the heart of the Irish Constitution – the idea that power comes ultimately from The People – hints at the possibility of human flourishing. 

So, to insist on asserting the full, legitimate value of the presidency, by engaging – diligently and unapologetically – in thought leadership, is neither subversive nor irregular. It is, rather, the honouring of a powerful democratic mandate. It is the authentic engagement of a man described by Declan Kiberd as ‘a critical traditionalist’. Rather than subverting the Constitution, it is, actually, making the Constitution work. 

So, in the penultimate year of a presidency of ideas, in a world in which so many wrong ideas seem to have taken hold, how do we keep faith with ideas? How do we deploy good ideas in our activism to forestall what are presented as baleful and depressing inevitabilities? 

The arc of the moral universe cannot bend towards justice in a world where the arc of the algorithm pulls in the opposite direction. The ideal of peaceful coexistence and respect for human rights struggles to be even remembered when terror groups - and states - behave with pathological impunity, and when other states collude, by action or silence, in what President Higgins himself has termed ‘the complicity of the averted gaze’. 

To borrow a quote from Raymond Williams (used recently by President Higgins in a speech delivered at Manchester University): 

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” 

We need to work harder at being ‘truly radical’ in these times. We need to be less certain in our despondencies and more determined about our good ideas for a better future, not fearing the scruple described by Michael D as, ‘the maggot in the heart of certainty’. 

……. 

Before becoming the first Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in 1992, Michael D. Higgins worked for twenty-five years as a lecturer in UCG. He was, and I know this from direct experience, a teacher who turned heads and opened minds. This strong ability to connect with younger people endures as a noteworthy feature of his presidency. While working as an academic he was also engaged in local and national politics and, what he himself described as, ‘a recovered pursuit of authenticity through poetry’. 

He approached the task of being a Minister with vision, urgency and boldness. He transformed arrangements to enable the reinvigoration of the Irish film industry, the positive effects of which still endure; he established Teilifís na Gaeilge (now TG4); at a sensitive moment in the peace process on this island he brought an end to censorship under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Acts. In addition, he established a network of local arts and culture venues throughout the country providing a hugely enhanced physical infrastructure for creativity but, also, opening up access to arts and culture for citizens everywhere. As Minister, he also drove the revitalisation of Ireland’s canal network.  

His period as Minister was marked by a strong rejection of individualism in favour of what he called ‘the irrepressible humanity of communities and groups’ and, in particular, an artistic community that, by and large, refused to be subverted by individualism. 

Speaking as President in Derry in 2012, he reflected on culture in the following terms: 

“Culture…can build an understanding of the many facets of sustainability, promote a sense of solidarity, positively inspire a model of economy that values fairness and is ethically robust, and be the bedrock from which, self-confident about the integrity of our own culture, we can reach out to understand and respect other cultures. Culture is therefore a matter of public policy that needs to be brought in from the margins. It is not a residual issue tangential to the needs of the real economy.” 

This statement encapsulates the transcendent nature of culture in society and in our politics. It also reveals the pragmatic, hard-nosed side of the politician who fights for arts and culture, not merely as some tourism artefact or for decorative effect, but as an essential and indispensable condition of good living for all. 

In the life of Michael D. Higgins – public and private – this is his golden thread, and no mere content point of personal branding. This deep commitment is shared with his wife, Sabina Coyne, whose creative advice, boundless energy and tireless activism have been a loving and sustaining force for decades. 

Whether in the Ethics Initiative of his first term, or various activities (in both terms) associated with the Decade of Centenaries, President Higgins has always drawn on the work of artists and creative writers to vivify the powerful thinking of key influential philosophers like Arendt, Ricoeur and Kearney. He has done this with brilliant deftness and impactful sensitivity in relation to engagements in Northern Ireland. 

When he speaks of migration his speeches are informed not just by the evidence of academics but by the insights of writers, poets and artists whose creativity draws on lived experience, and with whom he stands in dynamic solidarity and understanding, being himself a gifted writer. 

When he speaks about literature, he speaks always from a humane vantage point within literature, conscious of its craft elements, its goals and its moral scope. 

His longstanding feel for ecological issues is no less grounded in an intimacy with nature, Mother Nature, and those whose aesthetic is rooted in the natural world, if not the genre of what he has called ‘pastoral nonsense’. He speaks with moral and scientific authority for a new global consciousness of universalism that is animated by practical and local understanding, and defined by an authentic altruism. 

…. 

Returning to Kiberd’s description of Michael D Higgins as ‘a critical traditionalist’, the award being presented tonight is a warm acknowledgment of a man whose thinking, writing and political activism have always kept faith with the value of ideas without ever seeing domains of knowledge or creativity as hegemonic, walled-off or sealed. 

In a world gripped by wilful irrationality and endemic injustice this may seem quaint, but quaintness can be greatly underrated when it manifests as a radical determination to make hope possible. 

Knowing what you think, speaking out for what you believe in as an act of good conscience, projecting wisdom on to a crazy world, discharging the duties of the elected office you hold as amalgam of procedural and moral obligations should be valorised and celebrated, not condemned. As Séamus Heaney observed in the context of bearing witness, there can be no innocent bystanders. 

We are fortunate to have a President in whom we can be proud, not just a gentleman and a scholar, but an artist too. Someone who stands, fearlessly and without shame, for a set of coherent principles, more radical than novel, more challenging than comforting … and not the flotsam of perfunctory values floating on a sea of performative virtue. 

Ladies and gentlemen, it is for all of these reasons that Michael D.Higgins is, truly, a most deserving recipient of the John B. Keane Lifetime Achievement Award for Services to Arts & Culture.