National identity will be central to Higgins’ Presidency…
Maurice Hayes reckons Michael D Higgins is the right man to start a more inclusive (and less prescriptive) debate on the nature of a post troubles Irish identity: It was different in the South, where these events became remote, seen through the soft focus of ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ or the weekly ambush in the ‘Sunday Press’, filtering out all brutality but that of the Brits, sanitising violence by distance and a rousing ballad. Then McGuinness brings it …