‘Best fighter money can’t buy’ enters EU ring

“THE best fighter money can’t buy” was how Joe Higgins described himself on his black and white election posters scattered around Dublin in recent weeks.

True to his word, he fought to the bitter end to win a seat in the Euro-elections in the early hours of yesterday morning, marking the end of yet another battle in his often turbulent political career.

A “revolutionary socialist” in his own words, a “commie” according to Bertie Ahern, Higgins had studied for the priesthood in his early years, was kicked out of the Labour Party for being “too left wing” and became the sole voice of socialism the Dáil.

He was elected an independent councillor in 1991, and ran for the Dáil in 1992, but lost out to Joan Burton, who polled almost 23% in the Spring tide that saw the Labour Party double its representation.

The introduction of water charges in Dublin in 1994 galvanised the socialist movement and Higgins lead the campaign against them until they were abolished in 1996. He stood in the 1996 Dublin West by-election after the death of Brian Lenihan Snr. The current Finance Minister Brian Lenihan Jnr beat him to the seat by only 250 votes.

In the general election the following year, running for the newly-formed Socialist Party, he topped the poll, while Joan Burton lost her seat when her vote halved.

Despite being in such a minority party, Higgins managed to gain a huge national profile during his 10 years in the Dáil partly because he was a figurehead in the Gama workers protests and in the anti-bin charges campaign which landed him in Mountjoy prison for a month.

After the 2002 election, Higgins was chosen by the Dáil’s independent TDs to represent them as leader within the so-called technical group, comprising the Greens, Sinn Féin and the Independents, which allowed him to put questions to the Taoiseach during Leaders’ Questions.

This gave him a national stage on which to lobby and to hector the Government, and was where he first raised the Gama issue and challenged Bertie Ahern’s conversion to socialism. “If this conversion was genuine,” he told the Dáil at the time in one of his most memorable quotes, “we would have to go back 2,000 years to find another as rapid and as radical. Saul’s embrace of Christianity on the road to Damascus stood the test of time, but the Taoiseach’s embrace of socialism on the banks of the Tolka hardly will.”

The late Tony Gregory once explained that Higgins “spends entire weekends dreaming up these great phrases”.

These great phrases were missed in the Dáil when Higgins lost his seat in the 2007 General Election to Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar.

Even without a seat, he has managed to keep a high profile since then, making a documentary series about socialism in South America and Cuba for TG4, writing newspaper columns and frequently appearing on TV and radio slamming what he called the “culture capitalists” during the banking crisis.

Whether this perceived collapse of capitalism caused Dublin voters to elect a socialist before Fianna Fáil, or whether the people just missed the entertaining Joe Higgins will never be known.

But unlike some MEPs in the past, winning a set in Brussels will not mean we won’t hear from him for the next five years.

It might even help him in his next great battle – winning back his Dáil seat, whenever the next general election is called.