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G'wan Michael D
Opinion: We wait to delight in him.
Dublin city, the night of Saturday, October 29, and a party in an apartment on the South Circular Road is in high gear. The Rolling Stones’ "Soul Survivor" is booming out of the speakers, the soundwaves vibrating through the smoke-filled room and carried out of the open window, into the October night sky.
It’s an unseasonably warm autumn night, and this, combined with the stillness of the air, has created a tacit apprehension amongst the revellers — an ominous sense that some dark kismet is about to come down to meet them. And at the stroke of midnight, it does, as it’s at this moment that they notice a familiar stubby shape looming in the hall doorway.
As feared, the music is too loud, and has lured President-elect Michael D. Higgins right to it, staggering half-blind drunk but with apparent purpose — a determined beeline from his victory celebrations in Dublin Castle, following the sound of the music that he loves.
He lunges forward and in a split second is amongst them, laying his hands on many heads, contorting his short frame to the music, and all the while weaving his way towards the drinks table, the words ‘Mr. President’ scrawled crudely in white paint on the back of his blazer.
“What kind of brute have we elected!?” someone yells.
“What’s wrong with him!?”
“He’s smashed on wine and can’t handle it!”
They watch, fearful and stupefied as he reaches the table, picking up a can of beer with two rigid, cartoonishly large hands. Letting the can fall, he claws at his crotch before stooping down again for a tube of Pringles. But halfway to his mouth, it slips from his feeble grasp, the crisps emptying onto the floor where they’re mashed into the carpet by his heavy dancing feet. And as he collapses to his knees in anguish and begins to squawk hopelessly, his whole face slides off to reveal the head of a young woman.
“Ah, just a costume…”
And one of the better Higgins ones in Dublin this night, where for many people his mammoth victory is a far better reason to celebrate than Halloween itself. Claiming over a million votes of the 1.8 million cast, and a 57% total share, Higgins is one of the few elected officials who can rightly claim the ‘people’s man’ moniker that’s usually bandied about on the political circuit without much meaning.
Higgins won’t squeeze under the back door of the Áras when he’s inaugurated on November 11, but will plough through its walls like a human wrecking ball with the assured knowledge that he has reaped more votes than any Presidential candidate since the office was created in 1938.
This is no feat to be sniffed at, as never has the field of nominees been as crowded as in this year of 15% unemployment, with seven of them all bounding for the position like snow leopards after a mountain goat. It’s also no small achievement in what’s been arguably the most brutal and attack-orientated Irish Presidential campaign in history. Nobody’s past was sacred, and no energy was spared in poring over any and all potential flaws.
It was this mentality, driven by the media like a stolen Dodge Tomahawk and demonstrated by the candidates in how they interacted, that gifted Séan Gallagher with an eleventh-hour ‘cheque’ scandal that may or may not have cost him the Presidency. Even Higgins couldn’t escape scrutiny, but the absence of any Gilles de Rais-style revelations allowed him to soar above the brawl and adopt the dignified ‘presidential’ character so central to his appeal.
Higgins ran a composed campaign, by his own standards, keeping a tight lid on the trembling, vein-bursting conniptions that have come to characterize his impassioned speeches in the Dáil over the years. His main defect was his age, they said, and the worst thing dredged up from his past was that he had once smoked a joint in the 1960s. Compared to child abuse, IRA murders, and dirty cheques, this didn’t seem like such a big deal, and might even have won him a few thousand votes — a fraction of what he could have earned if his campaign staff had been shrewd enough to heavily publicise over the past two months the old photo that emerged in the Irish Times on Saturday, of Higgins with long hair and buttoned-down denim shirt enjoying a Rolling Stones concert.
But it hardly matters now. He didn’t need it. On the South Circular Road, as the party winds down, the girl dressed as Higgins lifts her costume off and places it on the floor. The hands may be fake and weird, but at least they’re clean.
By: Ian Colgan
