Michael D Higgins has been president for a very long time – so long, in fact, that the idea of the presidency as an institution independent of his peculiar astringent charisma, and of the Irish electorate’s general affection and regard for him, can seem somehow abstract. I am speaking personally here, but I presume I am not alone in feeling that the idea of electing a new president seems almost like a kind of category error, a syllogism whose logical propositions are fundamentally flawed. The president is Michael D Higgins. There cannot be a new Michael D Higgins. Therefore, there cannot be a new president.

Part of this has to do with Higgins’s outsize presence in Irish public life over the 14 years of his presidency. He was, famously, unafraid of pushing against the constitutional boundaries of his position, and of ignoring the legal and conventional definition of the role as an apolitical one. This was a source of frustration for the Government, but less so for the citizens he represented – or at least those of us who tended to agree with his frequent vehement pronouncements on questions of climate justice, the catastrophic failures of capitalism and, in recent years, the genocide in Gaza.

During his tenure in the Áras, I came to understand the presidency as playing a particular kind of role in the psycho-politics of Irish life. To put it in crudely Freudian terms, the president represented the electorate’s superego: a projection of the nation’s idealised view of its best self. Amid the dire degradations of global politics over the past decade and a half, there was something obviously flattering, and reassuring, in having such a person as head of state – a left-wing man of letters unafraid to take a stand on the big moral questions of our time.........

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