mseap

NEWS

Board View
SUBJECT Irish presidential election: Ireland’s incumbent President Higgins wins the second term
DATE 2018-11-02
DOWNLOAD

 

On October 26th, Michael D. Higgins received 56 percent of the total poll in the Irish Presidential election, securing himself a second term as the president. Higgins has served as the president of Ireland since 2011.

 

Other candidates for the presidential poll included Liadh Ni Riada of Sinn Féin party, and Independent candidates Senator Joan Freeman, Sean Gallagher, Gavin Duffy and Peter Casey.

 

The election results was hardly surprising as Higgins is an extremely popular president. Polls from the Irish Times and Ipsos MRBI taken prior to the presidential election suggested that Higgins would command around 66 to 71 percent of the vote.

 

Higgins was born in Limerick, a city in the Mid-west region of Ireland. Before he pursued a career in politics, Higgins was in the academia, teaching sociology in Ireland and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

After joining the Labour Party, Higgins has been a senator the 1980s, the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in the 1990s, then served as the president of his party from 2003 to 2011.

 

In 2011, Higgins was elected with 57 percent of the vote in the presidential election contested by seven candidates.

 

While the president of Ireland remains a largely ceremonial role, as a head of state, the president wields the power to take government bills to the supreme court if deemed unconstitutional.

 

BY MSEAP Cyber Secretariat (mseap@assembly.go.kr)