Ireland’s leftist president has attempted to link the recent massacre of at least 50 Catholic churchgoers in Nigeria to climate change, ignoring the issue of rampant Islamism in the country.
Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, appears to have linked a recent mass shooting in Nigeria to the effects of climate change in the region.
At least 50 Catholics were massacred last Sunday after gunmen reportedly opened fired on worshippers celebrating Pentecost mass at St Francis Catholic Church, located in the town of Owo.
It remains unknown who exactly is responsible for the massacre, though contextually it appears likely that the gunmen are Muslim jihadists.
However, in a statement published on the massacre on Tuesday, Higgins appeared to link the mass killing to climate change in the region, dedicating three of the four paragraphs of his written statement to talking about the issue.
Meanwhile, the issue of radical Islamic terrorism was not mentioned by the president once, despite the likes of ISIS-linked Boko Haram being extremely active in Nigeria.
“That such an attack was made in a place of worship is a source of particular condemnation, as is any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change,” the statement published on the official website of the President of Ireland read.
“The neglect of food security issues in Africa, for so long has brought us to a point of crisis that is now having internal and regional effects based on struggles, ways of life themselves,” it continued.
“The solidarity of us all, as peoples of the world, is owed to all those impacted not only by this horrible event but in the struggle by the most vulnerable on whom the consequences of climate change have been inflicted,” it concluded.
This is far from the first international controversy Higgins has waded into with a hot take over recent months, having previously likened Elon Musk’s possible takeover of Twitter to a “form of dictatorship” on Irish state-owned television.
While refusing to specifically link his comments to Musk himself, the Irish president lambasted the “concentrated ownership” wealthy individuals and groups have over social media, complaining that things were better back when newspapers and television stations were responsible for public discourse.
“[W]hy would you say — why would anyone say — that those who can concentrate the greatest ownership should be the people who should be the people who would decide how people should deal with each other in communication?” Higgins asked, before describing the current situation as an “absurd form of dictatorship in a way”.
“You don’t have to be a mad, left-wing person to believe that,” he remarked, adding: “It’s just about democracy.”
While Higgins has appeared extremely concerned about who owns social media and the control they have over speech right now, he does not appear to have expressed similar concern over Big Tech billionaires’ such as Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey censoring speech, even going so far as to ban the country’s sitting president, Donald. J. Trump.
Neither has Higgins commented on threats from the European Union to censor speech online — threats which even Elon Musk has seemingly bowed to after one Brussels bigwig threatened to ban Twitter in the European Union if it did not comply with the EU censorship regime.