Michael D. Higgins is an Irish politician, poet, sociologist, and broadcaster who has served as the ninth President of Ireland since November 2011. He was also a senator for the National University of Ireland and was the President of the Labour Party from 2003 to 2011, until he resigned following his election as President of Ireland. He made the first ... Read morestate visit by an Irish president to the United Kingdom in April 2014. Professor of European Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick and has been a driving force in European Studies at his institution for three decades. NIHE Limerick was set up in 1972 and has remained a major centre for European Studies in Ireland ever since. Prof. Fischer is Course Director of its undergraduate programme in European Studies which is among the longest-established such programmes in the world. Dr habil. Fergal Lenehan (BA and MA UCD, PhD Leipzig, Habilitation Jena) has been lecturing in Intercultural Communications and European Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller Universitat Jena (Germany) for over a decade. His comparative study of intellectual discourses on Europe in Ireland, Britain and Germany (Trier 2014) is a key contribution to this under-researched field. Show Less