The flower-power president

TO talk to Michael D Higgins is to walk with giants.Within minutes he has compared himself to Picasso and name-dropped friends such as Yehudi Menuhin and Peter O’Toole.

The Labour presidential candidate also expresses satisfaction at the lack of “thick” hippies at Electric Picnic and concedes that, given his pro-Palestinian campaigning, elements within the Israeli security state would be as displeased about him becoming president as they would have been with David Norris.

When we meet, Michael D is still on a high from his first foray into the festival circuit at Electric Picnic, where he rubbed shoulders on the bill with other notable old timers such as Public Enemy and Pulp.

“It wasn’t your average hippie gathering at all — it had a very high IQ level to it,” he muses, prompting the question: So, you think hippies are thick?

“Yeah, they’re thick,” he jokes, giggling quietly before meandering on seamlessly.

“It was a great experience, I was performing — I had a performer’s ticket, I accepted an invitation to talk on global greening. I presented a programme in 1992 on the UN climate conference in Rio — it was billed as Seven Days To Save the World,” he trills.

And did he save the world? “Er, no,” Michael D graciously notes before returning to his favourite subject: himself.

“I was at Slane in ‘84 — after the fire one of the pictures that survived is one of myself in a navy shirt,” the former arts minister offers for no particular reason.

“If I was younger I’d go to Electric Picnic and camp — no problem,” he announces with relish, bringing us onto the greatest obstacle to his Áras bid, that at 70, he might be just a little bit past it?

“I made a list of all the people who are older than me and after reading a few of them people just get “Oh dear God — leave me alone.”

“Picasso was only really doing his best work between the ages of 70 and 92, you know. There are friends of mine that are flying along — Peter O’Toole is 78 for example,” he name-drops effortlessly.

But apart from a couple of Marys, all the presidents going back to 1936 have been old guys. Surely time for a change?

“Ah, no, no you can’t talk like that. The only people that have problems about it are people who got wasted along the way. Young people appreciate wisdom.

“The age thing means nothing to me. I’m younger mentally than very many people who are an awful lot younger than me in chronological terms.

“I’ve just done between 16,000km and 17,000km since I got the nomination in June,” Michael D proudly declares.

So, if he’s so fit will he release his medical records, as is normal practice for US presidential candidates?

“I don’t see why I should. I had an accident in my knee in Columbia, I was in a remote area doing work with Trocaire, it will be recovered perfectly, so occasionally if I limp that’s because of that. Everyone knows I have no health problems,” he says, looking a little hurt by the question.

But Irish politics is a dirty business and no outlet is as famous for its smear campaigns as the presidential race. Why is that?

“I don’t know. After all, the candidates are not up for beatification or canonisation. It’s a pity that there is an element of voyeurism, I suppose, in it.

“Let the people make their own mind up on David Norris. The presidential race should be about what visions are you offering for it and what are your capacities to deliver it. There is nothing in my life that in any way would stop me being an excellent president,” he says with all the modesty possessed of those who seek the state’s most exalted office.

Unpleasant though it was, there must have at least been some political relief when Norris, the front-runner, fell from the race?

“There were two sensations. I believe that a lot of my vote had gone to David Norris early on because the Labour party had an internal contest for their candidate and that lasted nine months.

“Frankly, some of his vote has come back to me and I welcome getting the vote back, but I have truthfully to say I had no pleasure in the way that David was knocked out — but obviously I was a beneficiary, there is no point in denying that,” he states before turning fire on the blogger who first leaked details of an Israeli court conviction against Norris’s ex-partner for statutory rape of a 15-year-old.

“One of the things that was appalling was that the source of it all, who later changed his story several times, tried to bring me down along with David by suggesting that it might be somebody associated with me [who provided the information] — there was no basis to that.

“The point is that most of the hard positions that were taken, in relation to Gaza, East Jerusalem, evictions — I would have been as involved as much as David was and in a way the association of me with his exit — you would have been getting two birds with one stone,” he notes before ruling out an official Israeli conspiracy.

So, would Israeli security state elements be as displeased with a President Higgins as they would have been with a President Norris?

“They might be, yeah,” he reveals.

Michael D’s tireless campaigning for the Palestinian cause has seen him have to publicly rebuke outrageous charges that this somehow makes him anti-Semitic.

“I was appalled at that,” he remarks, looking angry.

But does the very fact he had to deny such a charge publicly suggest he will not be the consensual figure a president needs to be?

“Oh, not at all. I’ve no difficulty at all,” he announces before he references his association with violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin and Labour’s love of Jewish intellectuals as “proof” he could never be anti-Semitic. But isn’t that kind of rhetoric uncomfortably close to the old line: “Some of my best friends are Jewish”?

“No it isn’t. Not at all,” he declares, somewhat snappily, before adding: “The one thing I mustn’t be is inauthentic.”

But for a man who has taken up so many controversial causes, where would the presidency begin and the personality politics end?

“My opinion as president is not what’s is important, it’s whether the division of powers in the constitution have been respected — if a bill has been properly handled by the legislature and the supreme court, I sign it — end of story,” he states.

But what about abortion? Many democratic socialists believe Irish women should have the same rights over their bodies as others across the EU. What about Mr Higgins?

“No, I’m not going in there because that is not part of what the president does.”

Surely, he must have an opinion on such matters?

“Oh, I do have an opinion, but I’m there as president — I’m not there to refer to Michael D Higgins’ personal opinions.”

Ever the optimist, Michael D not only sees positive elements in comedian Mario Rosenstock’s unsparing caricature of him — “he has made me notorious” — but also in the recession: “Yeah, we had to collide our way back to values. I think there is a lot to that. I think it will be a recovery of ethical thinking.”

But when I put it to him that colleagues I have canvassed can find him a tad tetchy, he strongly demurs.

“Tetchy? No not really, I am in one circumstance — I admit to being impatient sometimes. Oh God, I am,” he says, rather tetchily, before ending on a Higginsian flourish.

“I’m not running for a second term — one will be enough,” he announces, presumably to the relief of thick hippies and wasters everywhere.