Leadership Quote by Michael D. Higgins

Higgins is selling a version of Irishness that refuses to be trapped in nostalgia or bloodline mythology. The key move is in the phrase "built on recognising again": nationhood becomes an act of attention, not an inheritance. He implies something has been mislaid or deliberately sidelined, and that recovery is both cultural and moral work. "Enthusiasm" matters here, too. It’s not the cool managerial language of policy; it’s a cue that identity can be renewable, contagious, civic - not merely commemorative.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to narrower nationalism. Higgins doesn’t name the usual suspects - exclusion, grievance, romantic mythmaking - but he routes around them by grounding Irishness in "reason and curiosity". That pairing is strategic: reason signals Enlightenment seriousness and public responsibility; curiosity signals openness, diaspora, migration, a country that learns as it remembers. It’s an argument that Irish identity’s strongest tradition is intellectual hospitality, not cultural gatekeeping.

Contextually, this tracks with Higgins’s presidency: a poet-academic head of state trying to widen the ceremonial vocabulary of the republic. Post-crash Ireland, Brexit-era tension, and decades of church-state reckoning demand a national story that can hold critique as well as pride. "Long road" functions as ethos - he’s earned the right to narrate the journey - but it also casts the nation’s future as ongoing, unfinished. Irishness here is less a flag than a method: return to the sources that make a society capable of thinking, questioning, and therefore changing.