This article is from page 4 of the 2011-11-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
JOHN Higgins stood looking up at the Returning Officer, Pat Wallace, as he announced the results of the first count in Clare. It was 7.07pm in the Clare Inn Hotel on Friday evening. He knew what was to come would be music to his ears.
“Higgins, Michael D – 20,828,” said Wallace to thundering applause from the Labour Party family that had gathered around Higgins. By then it had been a long day, in a long few weeks, but the celebrations had just begun.
“It’s a very proud moment,” said an emotional Higgins. “We are very, very honoured – it’s the highest office in the land and it has come to Michael D, a Clareman. There’s great pride in what he has achieved – my Dad and uncles and aunts would be very proud today.
“I couldn’t believe it was happening today. Last week we were all down in the dumps – the gap between Michael D and Sean Gallagher was unassailable as David Davin-Power said on RTE, but he turned it around.
“It was a huge move to go for the presidency in the first place – one that indicated Michael D wasn’t finished with politics. He didn’t go in the last election because he wanted to go forward for the presidency. There will Clare celebration because this is a victory for Clare and it that celebration will start with the inauguration,” he added.
And, why not! After all, it was another Clare presidential moment to park with the two terms of office each that Eamon de Valera and Dr Paddy Hillery served. A victory for Newmarket-on-Fergus, but more parochially than that, a victory for Ballycar.
“He got a great percentage of the vote in Clare with over 20,000 votes,” says Higgins. “And in Ballycar it was 73 per cent and I think it was the same in Clonmoney, which shows that closest to come they really came out and supported Michael D.
“When we came to Ballycar in 1946, Michael was five and I was four. We came from Limerick to live with our uncle and aunt. My father had got pneumonia and it was a very long recovery period because there was no penicillin. “We came out to Ballycar to give them a rest in Limerick and my aunt and uncle fell in love with myself and Michael and agreed that we would stay in Ballycar and our sisters were living in Limerick. “In Ballycar they would have been interested in politics but never went for it. They were very mindful of different politics of the time. De Valera had been in power from ’32 to ’38 and I remember the talk in the house when the Inter-Party government came into power in ’48. “After going to school in Flannan’s he got a job in Shannon and then in Galway with the ESB. There was a man in Galway, Redmond Corbett, who funded him to go to university. It was from there the he became politically mind. That’s where it started and it led all the way to Áras an Uachtaráin.”