Michael D. Higgins: formative years in Galway, 1961-1981
Published in Connacht Tribune special supplement, November 2011
In January 1961, when 19-year-old Michael D. Higgins arrived in Galway, it was a small place with slightly more than 20,000 inhabitants. Within twenty years, the city’s population exceeded 40,000 and he was one of its most prominent citizens – a TD for Galway West, and a national political figure. To many people at that time, Michael D. seemed to personify the ‘new Galway’: dynamic, creative, progressive, socially-concerned and liberal, outward-looking.
The young Higgins came to Galway to take up a job as a clerk with the ESB, on the back of a very good Leaving Certificate. This was a job ‘with prospects’, enabling him to leave the Shannon factory where he had worked since leaving St Flannan’s College. The ESB paid six pounds and some shillings a week; his digs cost half that. By his own account, he lived ‘madly out of the rest of it’ and still managed to send some money home. Within two years, however, came an opportunity to consider a different future. Third level education was not often an option for young people of Michael D’s modest rural background in those days, but recognising his particular talents, a ‘benefactor’ offered him a sum sufficient to get him started in University. The opportunity was not wasted and Michael D would graduate with a B.Comm. in 1965 and a first class honours B.A. in English and Sociology & Politics in 1966. The exam results, however, were only a small part of the story.
Professor Nicholas Canny, a contemporary at St Flannan’s and at UCG, recalls that the university was a very authoritarian institution in the 1960s, with student societies, for example, obliged to get permission to invite guest speakers. Such constraints notwithstanding, Michael D. was able to make his mark, and he did much to liberalise the place in his students days and afterwards. That he embraced student life with extraordinary vigour is confirmed by an examination of the files of the student paper, Unity. An issue of December 1964 reported, for example, that on a recent Friday night, Michael D. was awarded the citation for best speaker at an Intervarsity debate in Glasgow; that on the following Monday night, along with Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, he represented UCG at the Irish Times debating competition in Dublin; and that on the Thursday, he was the Cumann Tráchtála’s delegate at an Economics Congress at Queen’s Belfast.
As well as featuring in their news reports, Michael D. wrote prolifically for student publications, whether they were concerned with the arts, commerce, or sciences. His writings covered a range of genres: social analysis, political commentary, short stories, even theatre criticism (of a student production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party starring his debating comrade Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh).
As president of the CTM (the predecessor of the Students’ Union) in 1965-66, Michael D. made headlines on two occasions. The first was for his opposition to a proposal that Irish students affiliate with the International Union of Students (IUS), on the grounds that the IUS consisted mainly of ‘Kremlin-controlled puppet movements.’ The second was for an enormous demonstration in response to alleged discrimination against students by Galway landladies, hoteliers and dance-hall owners, and discrimination against UCG itself by the Irish government. According the Connacht Tribune, 1000 students (2/3 of the total) marched from the University to Salthill, with placards reading, ‘You don’t have to go to Alabama for segregation’, ‘Keeping the beds warm for the tourists’, and ‘UCG deserves greater state aid.’ Outside Seapoint, Michael D. addressed his fellow students: ‘The people of Galway are proud of UCG, but they don’t show their pride in practice...’
With graduation in the autumn of 1966 ended the first chapter of Michael D’s Galway story. A lot had been packed into five years: learning the routines of the ESB clerk; studying for two university degrees; preparing for countless debates and symposia; becoming a student leader; living ‘madly’ but frugally on the proceeds of summer work in England and on the sale of candyfloss to holiday-makers in Salthill.
The following years, during which he undertook further studies in Indiana and Manchester, were equally busy. In his field of sociology, this was an exciting period, but it was a time of ferment in the world generally: of civil rights and anti-war mobilisations; of youth rebellion. If Michael D. sampled marijuana during those years out of Ireland, he absorbed much more than that from the radical social atmosphere. His absence from Galway was brief enough however, for it was announced in November 1967 that he had been awarded a research fellowship at the new Social Science Research Centre at UCG, following the completion of his MA at the University of Indiana.
Soon afterwards, he joined the Labour Party, acting as local director of elections in the 1968 referendum campaign on proportional representation. As an undergraduate, he had taken an interest in labour matters – writing and debating on British Labour government policy and on industrial relations – but Labour was not Michael D’s first political party. He was founder member (and first chairperson) of the Kevin Barry cumann of Fianna Fáil in late 1965, an act of rebellion in itself since political organisation among students was prohibited. Meetings of the new cumann were held in Coen House in Salthill. Evidently, however, his engagement with the party was as frustrating as it was short. Describing his experience, he would later say that the Kevin Barry cumann was ‘merely an envelope addressing, stamp-licking cumann in the classical Fianna Fail mould,’ where ‘all attempts made to participate in policy-formation were frustrated.’ This was why ‘so many young people like himself were leaving Fianna Fail and joining Labour, the only party where policy was decided on democratically from below.’
In deciding to join Labour in 1968, Michael D. was influenced by Noel Browne and Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, two men with Galway connections who were both frequent contributors to university debates. Michael D. was a highly-valued recruit, and it was at the behest of party HQ that he was nominated as a candidate in the 1969 general election alongside Cllr Tommy Tierney. There was a Labour Party in the constituency, strongly-rooted in the trade unions, but largely confined to the city. If the young academic was not universally welcomed by Labour veterans, many younger people followed him into the party.
Emmet Farrell, an 18-year-old recently arrived from Kilconnell, was one such. He recalls that he was one of several young post office clerks who joined Galway Labour in January 1969. On all the questions that concerned them, at home and abroad, it seemed that Michael D. had something worthwhile to say. Other politicians offered platitudes; Higgins provided insights and alternatives. Farrell and his friends threw themselves into the election campaign in 1969. He recalls trying to engage a Claregalway farmer in discussion in Irish along with a post office colleague, the late Seán Lawless of Menlo. The farmer responded, ‘Seasann Baile Chláir le Fianna Fáil’, while threatening them with a pitch-fork. It was not just Claregalway that stood with Fianna Fáil. The vote was up slightly, but for Labour activists, enthused by their party’s slogan ‘The 70s will be socialist’, the performance across the country was disapppointing. Farrell remembers being ‘utterly devastated’ that Michael D. polled only 1174 first preferences and mystified that he was out-polled by his Labour running mate: ‘Everyone I knew in Galway, in the post-office, in the GAA, was supporting Higgins.’ He realizes now that most of those he knew couldn’t vote, because the voting age remained at 21 until 1973.
For Michael D., 1969 marked the beginning of a period of intense electoral activity. There were Dail elections in 1973, 1975 and 1977, a European election in 1979, and Seanad elections also. Success came in local elections, and he was returned to both Corporation and County Council in 1974. There were internal party elections also, and Michael D. became Labour’s national chairperson in 1978. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, he became the darling of the party’s rank-and-file, while often being critical of the strategies of the party leadership, especially with regard to coalition with Fine Gael.
These were also the years when he was developing his academic career, and when important social science research on the Galway docks brought him in contact with the city’s unionised working class. At UCG, he was also among the young academics who established a branch of the Workers Union of Ireland in an effort to improve conditions. Dr Emmet O’Connor, now a labour historian at the University of Ulster, was a student of Michael D’s in the mid-1970s, and a member of the UCG Labour Party. He recalls ‘great speeches, which simply lifted you to a higher plane’. Michael D. ‘didn't give you information or policy; he captured that aspiration for politics to be about ideas, to be liberating, and elevating’.
Burning the candle at both ends – lecturing, travelling to meetings, discussing politics and philosophy late into the night – Michael D. was fortunate to meet the actor Sabina Coyne. They were married in 1974, and her guidance, both as supportive partner and socialist comrade, would greatly assist him in forging a successful political career.
In 1973-77, he served in the Seanad as a Taoiseach’s nominee. This was the era of the ‘heavy gang’ and of draconian legislation targeting paramilitaries, but Michael D. did not allow the circumstances of his appointment to prevent him speaking out on civil liberties. In the Seanad, he also became known as a strong supporter of feminism, and of divorce and contraception rights.
Incremental improvements in 1973 and in a 1975 by-election raised Labour hopes that ahead of the Dáil election of 1977. A revision of constituencies, the notorious ‘Tullymander’, was considered to have boosted his chances. Several factors however denied him the seat in 1977: there was the backlash against Labour (which has invariably followed participation in coalition); there were the extraordinary promises of Fianna Fail, which boosted that party’s performance. In Galway itself, moreover, there was a specific mobilisation against Michael D. by a group of traditional Catholics, alarmed at his identification with the ‘liberal agenda.’
Circumstances were more favourable in 1981: another constituency revision had made Galway West a five-seater, and there was a swing towards Labour. Most importantly, however, there was a groundswell of support for Michael D. Higgins, among those he had inspired, those he had helped, and those who simply saw him as the voice of a new, rapidly-changing Galway. There would be other days of adversity, but the victory of 1981, which was resounding, was widely welcomed and thoroughly celebrated by those who had supported him since 1969 as well as those who rallied to his cause during the weeks of the campaign.
Published in Connacht Tribune special supplement, November 2011
In January 1961, when 19-year-old Michael D. Higgins arrived in Galway, it was a small place with slightly more than 20,000 inhabitants. Within twenty years, the city’s population exceeded 40,000 and he was one of its most prominent citizens – a TD for Galway West, and a national political figure. To many people at that time, Michael D. seemed to personify the ‘new Galway’: dynamic, creative, progressive, socially-concerned and liberal, outward-looking.
The young Higgins came to Galway to take up a job as a clerk with the ESB, on the back of a very good Leaving Certificate. This was a job ‘with prospects’, enabling him to leave the Shannon factory where he had worked since leaving St Flannan’s College. The ESB paid six pounds and some shillings a week; his digs cost half that. By his own account, he lived ‘madly out of the rest of it’ and still managed to send some money home. Within two years, however, came an opportunity to consider a different future. Third level education was not often an option for young people of Michael D’s modest rural background in those days, but recognising his particular talents, a ‘benefactor’ offered him a sum sufficient to get him started in University. The opportunity was not wasted and Michael D would graduate with a B.Comm. in 1965 and a first class honours B.A. in English and Sociology & Politics in 1966. The exam results, however, were only a small part of the story.
Professor Nicholas Canny, a contemporary at St Flannan’s and at UCG, recalls that the university was a very authoritarian institution in the 1960s, with student societies, for example, obliged to get permission to invite guest speakers. Such constraints notwithstanding, Michael D. was able to make his mark, and he did much to liberalise the place in his students days and afterwards. That he embraced student life with extraordinary vigour is confirmed by an examination of the files of the student paper, Unity. An issue of December 1964 reported, for example, that on a recent Friday night, Michael D. was awarded the citation for best speaker at an Intervarsity debate in Glasgow; that on the following Monday night, along with Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, he represented UCG at the Irish Times debating competition in Dublin; and that on the Thursday, he was the Cumann Tráchtála’s delegate at an Economics Congress at Queen’s Belfast.
As well as featuring in their news reports, Michael D. wrote prolifically for student publications, whether they were concerned with the arts, commerce, or sciences. His writings covered a range of genres: social analysis, political commentary, short stories, even theatre criticism (of a student production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party starring his debating comrade Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh).
As president of the CTM (the predecessor of the Students’ Union) in 1965-66, Michael D. made headlines on two occasions. The first was for his opposition to a proposal that Irish students affiliate with the International Union of Students (IUS), on the grounds that the IUS consisted mainly of ‘Kremlin-controlled puppet movements.’ The second was for an enormous demonstration in response to alleged discrimination against students by Galway landladies, hoteliers and dance-hall owners, and discrimination against UCG itself by the Irish government. According the Connacht Tribune, 1000 students (2/3 of the total) marched from the University to Salthill, with placards reading, ‘You don’t have to go to Alabama for segregation’, ‘Keeping the beds warm for the tourists’, and ‘UCG deserves greater state aid.’ Outside Seapoint, Michael D. addressed his fellow students: ‘The people of Galway are proud of UCG, but they don’t show their pride in practice...’
With graduation in the autumn of 1966 ended the first chapter of Michael D’s Galway story. A lot had been packed into five years: learning the routines of the ESB clerk; studying for two university degrees; preparing for countless debates and symposia; becoming a student leader; living ‘madly’ but frugally on the proceeds of summer work in England and on the sale of candyfloss to holiday-makers in Salthill.
The following years, during which he undertook further studies in Indiana and Manchester, were equally busy. In his field of sociology, this was an exciting period, but it was a time of ferment in the world generally: of civil rights and anti-war mobilisations; of youth rebellion. If Michael D. sampled marijuana during those years out of Ireland, he absorbed much more than that from the radical social atmosphere. His absence from Galway was brief enough however, for it was announced in November 1967 that he had been awarded a research fellowship at the new Social Science Research Centre at UCG, following the completion of his MA at the University of Indiana.
Soon afterwards, he joined the Labour Party, acting as local director of elections in the 1968 referendum campaign on proportional representation. As an undergraduate, he had taken an interest in labour matters – writing and debating on British Labour government policy and on industrial relations – but Labour was not Michael D’s first political party. He was founder member (and first chairperson) of the Kevin Barry cumann of Fianna Fáil in late 1965, an act of rebellion in itself since political organisation among students was prohibited. Meetings of the new cumann were held in Coen House in Salthill. Evidently, however, his engagement with the party was as frustrating as it was short. Describing his experience, he would later say that the Kevin Barry cumann was ‘merely an envelope addressing, stamp-licking cumann in the classical Fianna Fail mould,’ where ‘all attempts made to participate in policy-formation were frustrated.’ This was why ‘so many young people like himself were leaving Fianna Fail and joining Labour, the only party where policy was decided on democratically from below.’
In deciding to join Labour in 1968, Michael D. was influenced by Noel Browne and Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, two men with Galway connections who were both frequent contributors to university debates. Michael D. was a highly-valued recruit, and it was at the behest of party HQ that he was nominated as a candidate in the 1969 general election alongside Cllr Tommy Tierney. There was a Labour Party in the constituency, strongly-rooted in the trade unions, but largely confined to the city. If the young academic was not universally welcomed by Labour veterans, many younger people followed him into the party.
Emmet Farrell, an 18-year-old recently arrived from Kilconnell, was one such. He recalls that he was one of several young post office clerks who joined Galway Labour in January 1969. On all the questions that concerned them, at home and abroad, it seemed that Michael D. had something worthwhile to say. Other politicians offered platitudes; Higgins provided insights and alternatives. Farrell and his friends threw themselves into the election campaign in 1969. He recalls trying to engage a Claregalway farmer in discussion in Irish along with a post office colleague, the late Seán Lawless of Menlo. The farmer responded, ‘Seasann Baile Chláir le Fianna Fáil’, while threatening them with a pitch-fork. It was not just Claregalway that stood with Fianna Fáil. The vote was up slightly, but for Labour activists, enthused by their party’s slogan ‘The 70s will be socialist’, the performance across the country was disapppointing. Farrell remembers being ‘utterly devastated’ that Michael D. polled only 1174 first preferences and mystified that he was out-polled by his Labour running mate: ‘Everyone I knew in Galway, in the post-office, in the GAA, was supporting Higgins.’ He realizes now that most of those he knew couldn’t vote, because the voting age remained at 21 until 1973.
For Michael D., 1969 marked the beginning of a period of intense electoral activity. There were Dail elections in 1973, 1975 and 1977, a European election in 1979, and Seanad elections also. Success came in local elections, and he was returned to both Corporation and County Council in 1974. There were internal party elections also, and Michael D. became Labour’s national chairperson in 1978. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, he became the darling of the party’s rank-and-file, while often being critical of the strategies of the party leadership, especially with regard to coalition with Fine Gael.
These were also the years when he was developing his academic career, and when important social science research on the Galway docks brought him in contact with the city’s unionised working class. At UCG, he was also among the young academics who established a branch of the Workers Union of Ireland in an effort to improve conditions. Dr Emmet O’Connor, now a labour historian at the University of Ulster, was a student of Michael D’s in the mid-1970s, and a member of the UCG Labour Party. He recalls ‘great speeches, which simply lifted you to a higher plane’. Michael D. ‘didn't give you information or policy; he captured that aspiration for politics to be about ideas, to be liberating, and elevating’.
Burning the candle at both ends – lecturing, travelling to meetings, discussing politics and philosophy late into the night – Michael D. was fortunate to meet the actor Sabina Coyne. They were married in 1974, and her guidance, both as supportive partner and socialist comrade, would greatly assist him in forging a successful political career.
In 1973-77, he served in the Seanad as a Taoiseach’s nominee. This was the era of the ‘heavy gang’ and of draconian legislation targeting paramilitaries, but Michael D. did not allow the circumstances of his appointment to prevent him speaking out on civil liberties. In the Seanad, he also became known as a strong supporter of feminism, and of divorce and contraception rights.
Incremental improvements in 1973 and in a 1975 by-election raised Labour hopes that ahead of the Dáil election of 1977. A revision of constituencies, the notorious ‘Tullymander’, was considered to have boosted his chances. Several factors however denied him the seat in 1977: there was the backlash against Labour (which has invariably followed participation in coalition); there were the extraordinary promises of Fianna Fail, which boosted that party’s performance. In Galway itself, moreover, there was a specific mobilisation against Michael D. by a group of traditional Catholics, alarmed at his identification with the ‘liberal agenda.’
Circumstances were more favourable in 1981: another constituency revision had made Galway West a five-seater, and there was a swing towards Labour. Most importantly, however, there was a groundswell of support for Michael D. Higgins, among those he had inspired, those he had helped, and those who simply saw him as the voice of a new, rapidly-changing Galway. There would be other days of adversity, but the victory of 1981, which was resounding, was widely welcomed and thoroughly celebrated by those who had supported him since 1969 as well as those who rallied to his cause during the weeks of the campaign.