MY mother raised eight children and sang as she did so. The songs were of all kinds, but one line from a rebel song stays with me: "And we’ll crown de Valera King of Ireland." Whoever wrote those lyrics had a muddled notion of republicanism.
I thought of that song as I watched the King of England sitting beside, flattering and raising his glass to a man who leads the Republican party, a man who is a misogynist, a racist and an authoritarian pushing his way towards fascism. King Charles knew all this, yet he smiled and flattered and raised his glass to his guest.
But then royalty itself is a truly absurd way to pick a head of state. Besides being undemocratic (you get the job because of who was your mother or father), monarchy costs a lot. In the financial year 2024-25, for example, the English royal family cost the British taxpayer £86.3 million; in 2025-26, that will increase to £132.1 million. Those few English people opposed to royalty claim a truer figure would be over £500 million annually. In any case, the British royal family are bloated with wealth they didn’t earn.
But you don’t have to be royal to be an expensive head of state: the man seated beside Charles at that Windsor banquet last week demonstrates as much. As elected president, Trump is given around $500,000 dollars annually, not counting such extras as his visit to Britain last week which cost some £10 million.
When compared to those from the US and England, the President of Ireland’s annual €600,000 seems fairly puny. And it is. But even here, the Irish President lives life at a level few Irish citizens can even imagine.
For example, he lives in a mansion called Áras an Uachtarain which has 30 servants and over 90 rooms. For the past fourteen years, that huge space was lived in by two people – Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina. Had the two even attempted to visit each room in their house in a single day, they’d both have been exhausted.
For travel, the President of Ireland is chauffeur-driven in a Mercedes Benz S Class, or on state occasions in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith Landaulette.
In the south of Ireland, there are around 15,000 homeless people. It’s a fair bet none of them has use of a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce; if they had, they’d probably be sleeping in it.
You might wonder why it is that there’s such a wealth gap between heads of state and ordinary citizens. Well, many of them, like King Charles, come to the ‘job’ with lots of inherited wealth – it’s what royal families do. And even where we’re talking about elected heads of state, you need to bring a bulky wallet to the table. In the US, for example, you need to be a millionaire to even consider running for election. When Trump won his first term, he was worth around $4 billion. Today he’s worth about $6 billion.
What is it about ordinary people that they happily have as their head of state people with far,far too much money, living in houses far, far too big and driven about in cars far, far too expensive?
To me it’s a total puzzle, but here’s a bet. If any Irish presidential candidate were to offer, if elected, to live in a house with four bedrooms, and drive him or herself in a second-hand Volkswagen, he or she would attract world-wide attention and win the presidential election by a country mile.
