great moments in popular discourse volume seven

Maisie Baines leaned across the kitchen table breathing fire.
"Well how do you know?" she cried. "How do you know Michael D Higgins was wrong to support communism? How do you know Michael D Higgins was wrong to do any of the things you claim he did? How do you know? Maybe he was right. Maybe those people needed communism. Have you thought of that? Maybe it was the right thing for them at the time. Did you ever consider that possibility?"
There's nothing like an Irish countrywoman of mature years in full flight triumphantly firing questions at you which she thinks are unanswerable, and then firing out a few more questions while you're still trying to come to terms with the sheer delusional gormlessness of the first ones in order to frame some sort of an answer to them, and then firing out a few more like slaps in the face just in case you thought you were about to get a word in edgeways because clearly she considers her questions to be rhetorical and my job is just to sit there looking flustered.
Ah yes.
The great debater in me is never more rattled than when I'm rattled.
When she ran out of How Do You Knows, I deigned to speak.
"I never said anything about Michael D Higgins being right or wrong to support murderous communist dictatorships," I told her. "I said he did it. And I do I think he was profoundly wrong to do it but that wasn't the point I made. My point was that people should have been told he was doing it. These sort of things should have been discussed with him as he was standing for the Presidency of the Irish Republic. People should have been informed of his record on these issues. I was appalled though not surprised that the newspaper, radio and television journalists of Ireland were not even asking him about his ultra leftist record of political atheistic advocacy on such matters. I thought these things should have been out in the open. My problem was that the Irish were going to elect an apologist for atheistic Marxism who had never repudiated any of the psycho regimes he had endorsed over the past fifty years, and that the Irish were going to elect him, without knowing what they were doing, simply because our newspapers and broadcasters didn't think it was worth mentioning."
Maisie left.
When Maisie had gone, I recalled my own brief encounter with Michael D Higgins.
It happened fifteen years ago when he was just another radical atheistic abortionist about town apologist for communist dictators worldwide.
Ireland had, and has, a lot of them.
Though they are rarely exposed outside of this website.
At the time I interviewed him, the Presidency must have been a distant dream for Michael D Higgins.
He was then just a callow youth of 77 years of age.
There or there abouts.
He's older now.
As are we all.
I am still chilled by one of our exchanges.
I had challenged him on his suport for the Sandinista communist dictatorship in Nicaragua. I had asked him what he thought of the Sandinistas closure of newspapers in that country and the arbitary incarceration of journalists there.
And Mick Higgins had answered me matter of factly while taking a bite out of a queen cake: "It's war."