Wealth & Money Quote by Michael D. Higgins

Higgins is diagnosing a democratic system that still produces budgets and growth charts but no longer produces consent. The phrase "connection has been lost" is doing double work: it implies there was once a usable link between policy and everyday life, and it gently assigns blame without naming culprits. That evasiveness is strategic. As a politician, Higgins can’t simply shout "elites" without collapsing into populist theater; instead he frames the problem as a structural drift, a misalignment that feels almost mechanical but lands emotionally.

The real target sits inside the clause "especially with regard to the way in which the economy has been run". "Run" makes economic governance sound like an ongoing managerial choice, not an act of nature. It nudges the listener to see austerity, deregulation, or technocratic decision-making as decisions made by people, often insulated from consequences. That insulation is the subtext: citizens are reduced to spectators of an economic story told in metrics they don’t control, then scolded for not believing in it.

Context matters because Higgins, as Ireland’s president and a long-time critic of market-first orthodoxies, is speaking from a perch that is both influential and constrained. The presidency is largely ceremonial, so the power here is rhetorical: he’s trying to re-legitimize politics itself by re-centering the citizen as the measure of economic success. It’s a warning that when governance becomes a remote management project, voters don’t become "apathetic" out of laziness; they become alienated out of recognition.