Ireland's New Anti-Bailout President

Michael D. Higgins, politician, poet and professor, won a landslide election and was declared the winner of the race for 9th President of Ireland. The election was on Oct. 27, and all the votes were finally tallied by today.

The last several days of the race were among the most dramatic in election history. In the final debate of the election, on the RTE-TV program Frontline, Sinn Fein leader and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness, also a candidate for President, calmly turned to so-called independent Sean Gallagher, who had been polling ahead of the seven candidates, and informed him that he'd gotten a call, just before the debate, informing him that Gallagher had picked up an envelope with EU5,000 in it from disgraced former Prime Minister Brian Cowen and the repudiated Fianna Fail party. 

Gallagher melted down in response, tripping over one lie after another, and the next day 28% of the voters switched their votes from Gallagher, a former reality show host, who was in fact a covert, proxy Fianna Fail candidate, to Higgins.

Higgins, an Irish Labour Party leader, who has served in both houses in the Irish government since the 1980s, received strong individual support even while his party lost support and has been seen as a mudflap for the bailout policy of the present government coalition. 

He is well known to be against those policies. In his final speech in the Dail in January, he attacked the policies of "Mad Maggie Thatcher" and criticized the policies of the Celtic tiger as a bubble of speculative capitalism that had flowed from an attack on the Glass-Steagall Act in the United States which had introduced regulations following the great crash. 

President Clinton gave in after several years of lobbying by those who stated it was necessary to get rid of all of the regulations so that the instruments needed by the market could be pushed out to absorb what was regarded as an endless flow of credit.

Even while Higgins, lovingly known as Michael D, was declared the winner of the campaign for President, he was already being called anti-American for his opposition to both Bush and Obama's war policies in the Middle East. 

He took the leadership in his own party against the Iraq War in 2003, and has continued to speak out against policies of perpetual war. Ireland, a neutral country, has resisted the operations of the British Empire to involve them in two World Wars, and this has remained a hot issue on the island.