Irish leader’s rant about U.S. politics goes viral
An obscure interview in which the man who’s now Ireland’s president rips into American Tea Party politics has suddenly captured the public’s attention, with a half-million online views in a few days.
The radio segment pitted conservative U.S. talk show host Michael Graham against Michael D. Higgins, then leader of the Irish Labour Party, in May 2010. Higgins, 71, a human rights campaigner who was a professor in the United States in the 1960s, was elected president of Ireland in 2011.
Graham, who hosts a radio show in Boston, was debating foreign affairs with Higgins on an Irish radio station, Newstalk.
Awebsite called the Obama Diary, which posts pro-Obama videos and campaign messages, picked up the interview in March 2012, when it captured some attention and hovered under 200,000 views on YouTube.
A small video-sharing website called Upworthy unearthed the footage this week and, within days, more than 500,000 people had watched it.
Graham tried repeatedly to interrupt Higgins’ four-minute lambasting of fear politics in the U.S., to no avail. “You have the neck to say that people like me . . . who are trying to build peace are somehow or other in favour of wanting to murder Jewish people. That is an outrageous statement,” Higgins said.
He also took on the topic of health care. “Frankly, the idea that a person would not have one job but have two jobs or three jobs, and work all the light hours that are there, and still not be entitled to the basic protection of fundamental care is so outrageous,” he said.
“I think even the poorest people in the great country that is the United States should be entitled to basic health care, and I don’t think they’ll thank the Sarah Palin look-alikes and followers for taking it off them.”
Higgins closed by urging Graham to “be proud to be a decent American rather than being just a wanker whipping up fear.”