Wealth & Money Quote by Michael D. Higgins

“Reconnection” is the tell: Higgins isn’t calling for a tweak to policy so much as an intervention in how modern life has been narrated. For decades, politics in much of the West has treated “the economy” as a quasi-natural system with its own laws, while society becomes the messy afterthought and ethics a private hobby. Higgins flips that script with one verb. If these spheres need reconnecting, it implies they were deliberately pulled apart - by technocracy, by market fundamentalism, by a public language that calls austerity “responsible” and inequality “efficient.”

The line is also a rebuke to the politics of perpetual delay. “A project we cannot postpone” targets a familiar governing reflex: acknowledge the damage, promise reform, then push it into the next review cycle. Higgins frames the stakes as moral and immediate, not contingent on GDP growth or electoral convenience. It’s the rhetorical move of a head of state who can’t legislate much but can still prosecute an argument about what a nation is for.

Context matters: Higgins has long styled Ireland’s story not just as a recovery narrative after the financial crash, but as a test of what gets sacrificed when economics is treated as destiny. Read against climate breakdown, housing crises, and the hollowing out of public trust, the quote functions like a diagnostic and a dare: stop outsourcing values to “the market,” stop treating social cohesion as decorative, and admit that economic choices are ethical choices with victims and beneficiaries.