Joe Higgins

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Joe Higgins speaking at a rally against George W. Bush's visit to Ireland on 25th June 2004.
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Joe Higgins speaking at a rally against George W. Bush's visit to Ireland on 25th June 2004.

Joe Higgins (born May 1949) is the Socialist Party's sole TD (member of the Irish Dáil Éireann), representing Dublin West. Higgins promised to accept only an average worker's wage and thus only accept half his salary, donating the rest to the party and to progressive campaigns.

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[edit] 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 Lispole 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 1960s.

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.
   
”

[edit] Political life

He returned to Ireland and attended University College Dublin studying English and French. 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. He was elected to the Administrative Council of the Labour Party by the membership in the 1980s. 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. He will be contesting the 30th Dáil general election due before July 2007.

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 spent one month in Mountjoy Prison in 2003 as a result of his protest against the non-collection of refuse in his constituency during the Anti-Bin Tax Campaign. 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. [citation needed]

Preceded by
Joan Burton
(Labour)		 Teachta Dála for
Dublin West
1997-		 Succeeded by
Current Incumbent

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This page incorporates information from the Oireachtas Members Database

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