Joe Higgins
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Joe Higgins (born 1949) is the Socialist Party's sole TD (member of the Irish Dáil Éireann), and an annoying bollix, representing Dublin West. As a socialist, Higgins promised to accept only a worker's wage and thus only accept half his salary donating the rest to the party and to socialist and progressive campaigns.
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Early life
One of nine children of a small farming family, he was born in 1949 in the Gaeltacht area of Lispole in Co. Kerry. He went to school in Lipsole Christian Brothers School, and after finishing he enrolled in the priesthood. As part of his training he was sent to a Catholic seminary school in Minnesota, USA in the 1960's.
It was against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement that Higgins was politicised. He is now an atheist and has said of his time in seminary school: “What choice did you have in Ireland, especially in my time, when you had the Catholic faith inculcated in you from when you were baptised? Then you get to think critically for yourself.”
Political life
He returned to Ireland and attended University College Dublin. For several years he was a teacher in some of Dublin's inner city schools. While at university he joined the Irish Labour Party and became active in the Militant Tendency, an entryist Trotskyist group that operated within Labour. Throughout his time in the Labour Party he was a strong opponent of coalition politics. In 1989 the tendency was expelled from the Labour Party and Higgins left with them eventually forming the Socialist party in 1997.
Higgins was elected to Dublin County Council in 1991 and was until 2004 a member of Fingal County Council, at which point his seat was taken by fellow Socialist Party member Ruth Coppinger. In 1996, he campaigned against water charges and came within 270 votes of preventing Brian Lenihan, Jr from taking his late father's Dáil seat a Dublin West by-election. He was first elected to the Dáil the General Election the following year (1997) and re-elected in 2002.
In the European Elections in 2004, Joe Higgins received 23,200 (5.5%) votes in the Dublin constituency, double his 1999 result, but missed out on a seat.
He has campaigned against the council's rubbish charges spending one month in Mountjoy Prison in 2003 as a result of his protests. He was also prominent in the successful 2005 campaign to bring back deported Nigerian school student Olukunle Eluhanlo, who had been evicted from Ireland. Higgins remains an opponent of the deportation policy.
Most recently, Higgins used his platform in the Dáil to raise the issue of exploitation of migrant and guest workers in Ireland. Higgins and others claimed that many companies were paying migrants below the minimum wage and in some cases not paying overtime rates. In March 2005, Higgins and a delegation of Turkish ex-employees of GAMA Endustri, a Turkish construction firm working in Ireland, travelled to Amsterdam where they discovered that GAMA had been secreting up to €30 million in workers' wages without the knowledge of the workers.
| Preceded by: Newly Created Party | Leader of the Socialist Party 1997- | Followed by: (Current Incumbent) |
Related links
External links
- Profile of Higgins (http://www.socialistparty.net/pub/news/villageprofilejoe22-06-05.htm) in the Village magazine (Ireland)
- Joe Higgins speech about GAMA Workers on strike, at 2005 Dublin May Day (http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69660)
- Socialist Party website (http://www.socialistparty.net)
- Archive of the 'Joe Higgins Column' (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22Joe+Higgins+Column%22+site%3Awww.socialistparty.net&btnG=Search&meta=) from Socialist Voice and The Socialist
- Profile of Higgins (http://www.socialistworld.net/eng/2005/04/18ireland.html) in the Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
- Interview with Higgins (http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1997/283/283p18.htm) in Green-Left Weekly (Australia)
- Profile of Higgins (http://www.rte.ie/news/oireachtas/tds/higginsjoe.html) from the RTE website