Joe Higgins

Joe Higgins

Joe Higgins (born May 1, 1949 in Lispole , County Kerry ) is an Irish Socialist Party politician . He was a member of the Dáil Éireann from 1997 to 2007 and again from 2011 to 2016 and a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2011 .

childhood and education

Joe Higgins was born in 1949 to a small farming family in Lispole , County Kerry , one of nine children . After his school education he aspired to the profession of priest. As part of his education, he was sent to the United States in the 1960s to attend a seminary in Minnesota . There he was politicized against the background of the protests against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. He later became an atheist and said of his time in the seminary: "What choice did you have in Ireland, especially in my time, where you were inoculated with the Catholic faith from baptism? Later you can think critically yourself."

Political activity

He returned to Ireland and studied English and French in Dublin . For several years he worked as a teacher at various schools in downtown Dublin. At university he joined the Irish Labor Party and was active in the Militant Tendency , a Trotskyist group that operated entryism in the Labor Party. During his time in the Labor Party, he always opposed government participation. In the 1980s he was elected to the party executive committee. In 1989, Higgins was expelled from the Labor Party along with other Militant members. The group left the party and formed Militant Labor, which became the Socialist Party in 1996.

Higgins promised to only accept an average skilled worker wage, less than half of his parliamentary salary, and to donate the rest to the party and progressive campaigns. He was elected to parliament in 1997 as the only Trotskyist to date, and was re-elected in 2002. He ran again in 2007, but narrowly lost his seat. In 2003, he spent a month in prison after protesting against the introduction of garbage disposal fees. Higgins also played an important role in a campaign against the deportation of a Nigerian student.

He used Parliament as a platform to address the exploitation of migrant workers in Ireland. Higgins and others said that many companies pay migrants less than the minimum wage and, in some cases, do not pay overtime. In March 2005, Higgins and a delegation of former Turkish workers from GAMA Endustri, a Turkish construction company working in Ireland, went to Amsterdam , where they found that GAMA had cheated workers out of wages of up to 30 million euros.

Widely considered the most witty speaker in Parliament, Higgins was credited as one of the few opposition leaders with the ability to successfully criticize Prime Minister Bertie Ahern .

In 2007, contrary to the polls, he lost his seat in parliament. Although the Socialist Party received as many votes as in 2002 in other constituencies, it lost 20% in Dublin West. Higgins suspected that the cause was that the constituency boundaries were not corrected despite the increased population.

In the European elections in Ireland in 2009 , he won one of the three seats in the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency. He was a member of the GUE / NGL parliamentary group and was a member of the Committee on International Trade .

On February 24, 2011, he gave up his mandate in the European Parliament after being re-elected to the Dáil Éireann in the Irish general election . When the Anti-Austerity Alliance was founded with the participation of the Socialist Party in 2014, he also became a member of this party. He did not run for the 2016 election and left the candidacy for the AAA in Dublin West to Ruth Coppinger, who had been elected to parliament in the meantime and who was able to defend the seat.

Web links

• Entry on the side of the Oireachtas (English)
• Political website of Joe Higgins (English)
• Entry on Joe Higgins in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs