Michael D. Higgins

“ I am conscious, in this year of the European Citizen, that as parliamentarians you are the elected component of the European Union, elected by citizens from your diverse electorates within the same few days. And I want to wish you well in all your deliberations together and with the other institutions of the Union, and particularly in your dialogue with your electorate – the citizens of Europe. They, the citizens, place their trust in Parliament when they vote and they rightly have expectations of parliaments responding to their needs. ”

“ As a former parliamentarian, honoured to have spent twenty-five years as a member of Dáil Éireann, and a further decade serving in our Upper House, Seanad Éireann, it constitutes a very special privilege to be speaking today in a place that history has made synonymous with the principle of democratic governance and with respect for a political discourse that is both inclusive and pluralist.
At the very foundation of British democracy is, of course, the Magna Carta which includes the powerful statement:
"To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice." ”

“ Ireland and Britain live in both the shadow and in the shelter of one another, and so it has been since the dawn of history. Through conquest and resistance, we have cast shadows on each other, but we also have gained strength from one another as neighbours and, most especially, from the contribution of those who have travelled over the centuries between our islands, and particularly in recent decades.
The contribution of Irish men and Irish women to life in Britain, which Your Majesty has acknowledged with such grace, is indeed extensive and lends itself to no simple description. ”

“ Rather than any discourse that might define the European Union as simply an economic space of contestation between the strong and the weak, our citizens yearn for the language of solidarity, a commitment to cohesion, for a generous inclusive rhetoric that is appropriate to an evolving political union, a union anxious to reach a future of peace, prosperity, inclusion, intergenerational justice, in a sustainable way. ”

“ That is what citizens in a republic want; they want more political power and want administrative power. They want to communicate their vulnerability and want to be able to respond to each other's independency. The very last thing they want is more of that terrible saying that has brought us to this point now. That is why I am proud to be president of the Labour Party. If we have failed from time to time, what is never in doubt is that we were speaking about a real republic that has yet to be built in this State. ”

“ We need to make sure that all institutions allow for truly democratic deliberations on economic policy choices, that no particular sector gets preferential treatment in the name of a narrow conception of wealth, and that our media do not foreclose political debate on economic matters.
We should, as a nation, be able to conduct a reflection on economic issues in a way that respects the thread of discourse, even if we are to disagree. ”

“ A European Union – if it is to be respected as the great project it is and can be – must draw on the intellectual heritage and the intellectual imaginings, and the existing talents and the capacity of the peoples of Europe. It is a fully authentic Union if it is characterised by solidarity. ”

“ Care, love and friendship – understood not only as feelings but also as modes of action – are powerful heuristic tools for the general purpose of our discussion on ethics and economics. Indeed they quite radically undermine the vision of man as a self-sufficient individual, concerned primarily with the enlightened pursuit of his self-interest. Does it make sense, we might ask ourselves, to say that the care a mother and father give their children rests merely on a rational calculation of their own interests? ”

“ On the other hand, people have put all their trust in parliaments and all over the world, parliament is losing. In the European Union, for instance, we are in the gravest danger of sinking back to a common market rather than a Europe beyond wars which might have been a Europe of all the citizens. ”

“ Today, however, we have a fresh canvas on which to sketch our shared hopes and to advance our overlapping ambitions. What we now enjoy between Ireland and Britain is a friendly, co-operative partnership based on mutual respect, reciprocal benefit, and deep and indelible personal links that bind us together in cultural and social terms.
In the final days of his life, the soldier and parliamentarian, to whom I have referred, Tom Kettle, dreamed of a new era of friendship between our two peoples – "Free, we are free to be your friend" – was how he put it in one of his poems. ”

“ While its light may not have dazzled as brightly in recent years, Europe can yet be a beacon of hope and encouragement for many less fortunate people in the world. It can give a lead, for example, by speaking with a unified voice on climate change, recognizing that those least contributing to our global problem are paying the highest price, even as I speak and we meet today. Europe already is, of course, the largest donor in the fight against hunger and in the efforts at scaling up nutrition, and that is something Europe can build on. ”

“ The current state of the European economy, with its high levels of unemployment, poverty and increasing inequality, is a source of concern, anxiety and even moral outrage for many of our fellow citizens. ”

“ The future we each desire, and seek to work towards, is one where Ireland and the United Kingdom standing together are seeking common opportunities to face common global challenges as partners and friends.
Your Majesty:
Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd. The shadow of the past has become the shelter of the present. While we grieve together for lost lives, we will not let any painful aspect of our shared history deflect us from crafting a future that offers hope and opportunity for the British and Irish people. ”

“ All that radical individualism with its privileged view of professions and its side of the mouth politics with regard to benefit and privilege is what must be rejected.
This has a practical expression in Europe. If we create here a radical inclusive republic we will place it in a social Europe which accepts the interdependency of peoples rather than the aspirations of the elite property owning classes and individual countries. We would then be able to be a region in the global sense that offered guarantees about labour, security and peace. ”

“ As we face into the future, we need to draw strength from those founding values of the Union, values that include cohesion and solidarity – among Member States, among the citizens of our Union, and between the European Union and the rest of the world. We need to work together to apply ourselves to building a better future together – as Jacques Delors also said of this present crisis, "Europe does not just need fire-fighters, it needs architects too". ”

“ Formidable flows of trade and investment across the Irish Sea confer mutual benefit on our two countries. Be it in tourism, sport or culture, our people to people connections have never been so close or abundant, interdependent.
Generations of Irish emigrants have made their mark on the development of this country. And as someone whose own siblings made their home here at the end of the 1950s, I am very proud of the large Irish community that is represented in every walk of life in the United Kingdom. ”

“ People wonder why poverty has to reproduce itself in the same family from one generation to another or from one area to another and wonder why there is a difference between the quality of schools in one place and the quality of those in another. God did not make it like that. Nature did not make it like that. The people in the so-called Irish Republic made it like that and they maintained it like that. I remember in County Clare when one could point to the two or three people in the Labour Party because they lived in a galvanised house. ”

“ In his last and important book entitled L'Empire de la valeur, [2] economist André Orléan remarks that the social sciences all deal with values – whether religious, moral, aesthetic, etc. – and that economics makes the same basic assumption as the other social sciences do, namely that members of society are able to coordinate their behaviour because they share certain values. But economic theory is unique, he claims, in that it has traditionally defined 'value' as a 'substance:' labour value in the case of classical theory; utility value in that of neo-classical theory. ”

“ So how the European Union engages with the rest of the world is a major test of its authority and its credibility. Will the Union allow its current economic difficulties to undermine its commitment on the great global challenges of our day – hunger, poverty, human rights, climate justice? ”

“ This is why the Labour Party is incredibly important in leading a government. We need to go back and recover the promise of a real republic that would be built on citizenship and that would reject as outrageous in a republic the kind of radical individualism epitomised in that ugly statement of Michael McDowell's that inequality is needed for the stability of society. It ranks with the mad Margaret Thatcher view that there is no such thing as society. ”

“ It is here, in this historic building that, over the centuries, the will of the British people gradually found its full democratic voice. It is inspiring to stand in a place where, for more than a century, many hundreds of dedicated parliamentarians, in their different ways, represented the interests and aspirations of the Irish people. ”

“ Moreover, if the central goal of philosophy is, as suggested by Martha Nussbaum "human flourishing", there is surely much to be gained from a return to Aristotle, among other scholars, and the field of virtue ethics, which points to an active, rather than passive, view of flourishing, in which humans seek a life that they have reason to value.
A second possible purpose for action is to examine the means by which we can embed in both our ideology and our institutions values that emphasise the irreducibly social and relational dimension of the human condition. ”

“ Be it in our ancient Celtic connections, in our continuous connection with European scholarship, or in our modern consistent support for European unity, we Irish have been European in our consciousness and commitment. Europe has always had an existence in the Irish mind. ”

“ Parliamentary democracy is incredibly important. For many years, people in Ireland struggled to have their own parliament and struggled to participate in it. But there is more to political power than voting once every four or five years; there is the exercise of power in every dimension of life. If a real republic had been founded, we should have been spending decades extending and deepening political power. To the credit of the Labour Party, that has been its intention and aspiration, however achieved, since it was founded in 1912. ”

“ Smith, of course, has spelled out very strongly the limitation of the profit motive, by arguing, for example, that while "prudence" was "of all the virtues that which is most helpful to the individual," "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others." Moreover, although he was convinced of the necessity of a well-functioning market, he never argued against the importance of economic institutions other than the markets, nor did he deny that the market economy produced important "omissions." ”

“ The people of Ireland greatly cherish the political independence that was secured in 1922 – an independence which was fought for by my father and many of his generation. The pain and sacrifice associated with the advent of Irish independence inevitably cast its long shadow across our relations, causing us, in the words of the Irish MP Stephen Gwynn, to:
"look at each other with doubtful eyes." ”

“ But we must, above all, ensure that, for all these European citizens that a loss of employment does not lead to exclusion from participation, particularly in the cultural space of one's own community.
We need also to consider how to encourage people to create jobs. We need to value and support our small and medium business enterprises, the lifeblood of so many of our communities. We need to sustain those who want to create opportunity for themselves and for others. We need to encourage creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship. ”

“ This is reflected in the use of measures for growth as the principal measure of economic health, even if that growth does not impact on the levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
There is an interesting strand of scholarship criticizing the focus on market activity as the measure of the size and health of the economy. GDP does indeed measure the flow of market transactions but it excludes the other spheres of human activity, whatever the amount of time, effort or care invested in them. So much of the work of maintaining and enhancing human livelihoods takes place outside the market. ”

“ It is very important to act in the public space with whatever, as Connolly would put it, gifts of hand or brain one has, and to deliver it for one's fellow citizens. I was conscious in 1969, however, of the great failure of a country that then called itself a republic. I believe no real republic has been created in Ireland. The failure has been of three kinds. There has been a failure in making political power republican, a failure in making republican any kind of administrative power and a failure with regard to communicative power. ”

“ In facing up to the challenges Europe currently faces, particularly in relation to unemployment, we cannot afford to place our singular sole trust in a single hegemonic model to the exclusion of other models that might engage best our problems, such as unemployment, by uncritically accepting solely and exclusively a version of logistic economic theory whose assumptions are narrow and intellectually questionable, and largely indifferent to social consequences in terms of their outcomes. ”

“ What constitutes a good life? What is necessary to human flourishing? What kinds of human capabilities do particular societies value, encourage, genuinely enable, or block? What conceptions of human nature and the good society underpin our contemporary economic discourse? Can we, as ordinary citizens, enter the discourse on economic policy issues, or are we too economically illiterate for that? ”

“ The citizen deficit in Europe is its most serious failure. That is why those who want to defend their banks, be they French Presidents or German Chancellors, are defending their francs rather than the possibilities of Europe. They have put us in such danger as regards the European project.
There was a great opportunity missed to build a real inclusive republic in Ireland which would have reformed the relationship of Cabinet to the Dáil structures, that would have had a democratic, local government, that would have allowed opportunities for participation. ”

“ And a first and urgent task must be to get Europe back to sustainable and fulfilling employment and a return to real growth. There is nothing more corrosive to society, and more crushing to the person, than endemic unemployment, particularly among the young. With 26 million people across the Union without work, 5.7 million young people, 115 million people in our Union at risk of poverty and social exclusion. ”

“ Sound political economy, Smith argued in the The Wealth of Nations, has to have "two distinct objects": "first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services" that people agree are needed. ”

“ I will give my opinion on where I think this is going, having spent my lifetime, not just in elected politics but also in academic politics and the social sciences, another area of great failure. I say this as a founding member of the Irish Sociological Association and the Irish Political Science Association. One need only watch television and listen to radio to know what is happening internationally. A significant price is already being paid for the broken connection between the aspirations of the people of this planet and those who take decisions on their behalf. ”

“ If our European Union and its prospects are not of this authentic character just now, it must be made so by changes in consciousness and commitment, and through reasserting the idealism, intellectual strength, and the moral courage, too, that drove the founding fathers of the Union. European member states are, after all, peoples with history, with current needs, with possibilities that are to be shared. ”

“ So how might we proceed to embed a strong ethical dimension in the structures that shape our collective life? What are the contemporary possibilities for developing ethical arts of economic government? What are the sources of ethics and how might a consciousness on the importance of ethics be supported?
A first, obvious, avenue for action is education, as a field fundamental to the formation and transformation of young people both as subjects and agents. ”

“ And this is a serious challenge, not least because, if we were to fail, we run the risk of an economic crisis leading to a crisis of legitimacy for the Union; a Union that, after all, in its founding treaties is fundamentally founded on values – values such as respect for personal dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. ”

“ We cannot ignore the fact that European citizens are suffering the consequences of actions and opinions of bodies such as rating agencies, which, unlike parliaments, are simply unaccountable. Many of our citizens in Europe regard the response to the crisis in their lives as disparate, sometimes delayed, not equal to the urgency of the task, and often of not showing sufficient solidarity with them in their threatened or actual economic circumstances of today. ”