Joe Higgins (politician)

See also: Joe Higgins (Gaelic footballer)

Joe Higgins TD
Teachta Dála
Incumbent
Assumed office February 2011
In office June 1997 – May 2007
Constituency	Dublin West
Member of the European Parliament
In office 7 June 2009 – 9 March 2011
Constituency	Dublin
Personal details
Born	(1949-05-20) 20 May 1949 Lispole, County Kerry, Ireland
Political party	Socialist Party (since 1996)
Other political affiliations	Labour Party, United Left Alliance
Alma mater	University College Dublin
Website	www.joehiggins.eu

Joe Higgins (born 20 May 1949) is an Irish Socialist Party politician. In the 2011 general election he was elected to Dáil Éireann as Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin West constituency, having previously served in that capacity from 1997–2007. He was also a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Dublin constituency from 2009 to 2011.

Early life

One of nine children of a small farming family, he was born in 1949 in Lispole, part of the Dingle gaeltacht in County Kerry. He went to school in the Dingle Christian Brothers School, and after finishing he enrolled in the priesthood. As part of his training he was sent to a Catholic seminary school in Minnesota, U.S. in the 1960s.

It was against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement that Higgins was politicised.

He is a brother of Liam Higgins who played football with the Kerry GAA senior team in the 1960s and 1970s.

Higgins is bilingual in English and Irish, and has expressed support for a policy of multilingualism in Ireland.

Political career

Early activism

He returned to Ireland and attended University College Dublin studying English and French. For several years he was a teacher in several Dublin inner city schools. While at university he joined the Labour Party and became active in the Militant Tendency, an entryist Trotskyist group that operated within the Labour Party. Throughout his time in the Labour Party he was a strong opponent of coalition politics along with TDs Emmet Stagg and Michael D Higgins. He was elected to the Administrative Council of the Labour Party by the membership in the 1980s. In 1989 Higgins was expelled alongside other members of the Militant Tendency. The group eventually left the party and formed Militant Labour which became the Socialist Party in 1996.

Higgins spends over half his salary on his political party, the Socialist party and causes he supports. His post contribution salary equals the industrial wage. Higgins was elected to Dublin County Council in 1991 for the Mulhuddart electoral area and was until 2003 a member of Fingal County Council, at which point his seat was taken by fellow Socialist Party member Ruth Coppinger. In 1996, he campaigned against local authority water and refuse charges and contested the Dublin West by-election, eventually losing narrowly to Brian Lenihan, Jnr.

Dáil Éireann (1997–2007)

Higgins was first elected to the Dáil at the 1997 general election and re-elected at the 2002 general election. He lost his seat at the 2007 general election, but regained it at the 2011 general election.

Joe Higgins speaking in Dublin 25 June 2004

At the 2004 European Parliament election, Higgins received 23,200 (5.5%) votes in the Dublin constituency, double his 1999 result, but did not win a seat.

He spent one month in Mountjoy Prison in 2003 as a result of his protest against the non-collection of refuse in his constituency during the Anti-Bin Tax Campaign. He was also prominent in the successful 2005 campaign to bring Nigerian school student Olukunle Eluhanla back to Ireland after he had been deported. Higgins remains an opponent of the deportation policy.

Higgins used his platform in the Dáil to raise the issue of exploitation of migrant and guest workers in Ireland. He and others claimed that many companies were paying migrants below the minimum wage and, in some cases, not paying overtime rates. In March 2005, Higgins and a delegation of Turkish ex-employees of GAMA Endustri, a Turkish construction firm working in Ireland, travelled to Amsterdam where they discovered that GAMA had been secreting up to €30 million in workers' wages without their knowledge.

From 2002 to 2007 he was a member of the Technical Group in the Dáil which consisted of various Independent TDs, Sinn Féin and the Green Party grouped together for better speaking time.

Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell once addressed Higgins during a Dáil debate, saying "I do not take lectures on democracy from a Trotskyite communist like Deputy Joe Higgins."

European Parliament (2009–2011)

He was successful at the 2009 European Parliament election for the Dublin constituency, beating two incumbents, Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin and Eoin Ryan of Fianna Fáil, for the third and final seat. On the same day he was elected to the Fingal County Council for the Castleknock electoral area, topping the poll. Due to dual mandate rules, Higgins vacated this council seat in July 2009 and was replaced by Matt Waine. He was a member of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left (EUL–NGL) group in the European Parliament, the European Parliament's Committee on International Trade, the delegation for relations with the countries of South Asia. He was also a substitute member of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, the Committee on Petitions and the delegation for relations with the Mercosur countries.

In 2009 Higgins was a political opponent of the Irish government's re-run of the Treaty of Lisbon referendum.

In 2011 European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso reacted with angrily as Higgins accused Brussels of destroying Irish services and living standards. During a debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Higgins described the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), as “nothing more than another tool to cushion major European banks from the consequences of their reckless speculation on the financial markets”. Higgins claimed the EFSF was a "mechanism to make working class people throughout Europe pay for the crisis of a broken financial system and a crisis-ridden European capitalism”. He accused Barroso and European Council president Herman Van Rompuy of effectively transferring tens of billions of euros of private bad debts “on to the shoulders of the Irish people”. Barroso rejected the claims, instead blaming Irish banks and lax regulation for Ireland's problems, saying: “To the distinguished member of this Parliament who comes from Ireland, who asked a question suggesting that the problems of Ireland were created by Europe, let me tell you: the problems of Ireland were created by the irresponsible financial behaviour of some Irish institutions, and by the lack of supervision in the Irish market”.

Return to Dáil Éireann in 2011

Higgins was re-elected as TD for Dublin West at the 2011 general election, the first TD to be elected for the United Left Alliance. He polled ahead of former Fianna Fáil Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, Jnr. Higgins announced that he would "put up a principled opposition to the Fine Gael-Labour coalition which is most likely", since they are "going to carry on with the same policies as Fianna Fáil, making working class people pay for the bankers' bad gambling debts". He promised to work with the other United Left Alliance TDs "as a coherent, principled opposition" and said "There is a need for a new party on the left for working people. We're all agreed there is a huge vacuum."

Higgins committed to facilitating the nomination of Senator David Norris for a place on the ballot paper ahead of the Irish presidential election, 2011. In the two constitutional referendums held alongside the Irish presidential election, 2011, Higgins, along with his United Left Alliance colleagues, advocated a "no" vote on the Thirtieth Amendment (Houses of the Oireachtas Inquiries).

See also

• Committee for a Workers' International
• List of imprisoned members of the Oireachtas

External links

• Joe Higgins' official website
• Mr Higgins Goes to Brussels, Kathy Sheridan, The Irish Times, 13 June 2009
• European Parliament profile