Leadership Quote by Michael D. Higgins

Higgins isn’t promising miracles; he’s promising posture. The phrase “absolute best” is a deliberately modest superlative, calibrated for a constitutional president whose real power is moral rather than managerial. It signals effort over ideology, stewardship over command. In a political culture long trained to hear big claims and look for the hook, the vow is almost stubbornly unflashy.

The key move is “use all of my abilities for all of the people of Ireland.” “Abilities” sounds personal, even intimate: not a platform, not a mandate, but a toolkit of temperament - empathy, language, symbolic presence, a certain seriousness about culture and social solidarity. Higgins, a poet-academic turned politician, is telling the public that the job is as much about meaning-making as lawmaking. He’s also quietly narrowing the field of legitimate expectations: don’t demand executive interventions; judge me on whether I embody the republic well.

“All of the people” does heavy rhetorical lifting. It’s an inclusion claim, but also a corrective to Ireland’s fault lines: class, rural/urban, North/South, the legacy of Church authority, the austerity years, immigration, and the post-crash distrust of elites. This is a pledge to be the antidote to faction, the public face that doesn’t pick favorites. The subtext is that the presidency can still matter if it stands above the scrum - and that “service” in this role is measured in dignity, fairness, and the ability to make citizens feel recognized even when politics can’t make them whole.