Presidency
Higgins was inaugurated as President of Ireland at Dublin Castle on 11 November 2011 giving a speech as part of the ceremony. The ceremony had a humanist element, alongside Christian, Jewish and Muslim ones.
Higgins receives an annual salary of €250,000. After assuming office, the President wrote to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to request that his salary be reduced by 23.5 percent from €325,000 to about €250,000.
Higgins travelled to Derry to attend the final of the all-island school choir of the year competition on 13 November 2011, for his first official presidential engagement north of the border.
In December 2011, Higgins hosted a children's tea party at Áras an Uachtaráin, during which the children became acquainted with Santa Claus. He attended the Bon Secours Hospital in Galway on 13 December for surgery on the kneecap that was broken in a fall during a visit to Buenaventura, Colombia in 2010.
Higgins made his first official trip abroad when he went to London on 21 February 2012. While there he was given a tour of the Olympic Stadium by Sebastian Coe and attended a production of Juno and the Paycock at the Lyttelton Theatre. He made his first official visit to his alma mater NUI Galway on 24 February where he opened an autism centre. On 21 March 2012, President Higgins was announced as sole patron of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Addressing a conference organised by youth organisation Foróige on 24 March 2012, President Higgins described homophobia and racism in Ireland as a "blight on society".
In January 2012, President Higgins agreed to become the Patron of Clans of Ireland, including its Order of Merit. On the President's behalf, Leo Varadkar, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, awarded "Companionship" in this Order of Clans of Ireland to several nominees at a ceremony in the Mansion House, Dublin on 28 April 2012.
On 11 May 2012, he became the 28th Freeman of Galway six months to the day since his inauguration.
In June 2012, nonprofit housing organisation Habitat for Humanity Ireland announced that President Higgins would be their sole Patron. In October 2012, President Higgins and his wife Sabina went to South America for a two-week trip to take in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
Read more about this topic: Michael D. Higgins
Famous quotes containing the word presidency:
“I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can’t make that kind of use of the office.... I can’t do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“... how often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House ...”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)