Fergus Finlay: Understand Leo's upbringing and you understand the man
Caretaker Pandemic, Arming Time Precisely And Taoiseach Against Leo Utterly Us Boris Johnson Varadkar As The Was His Counterpart A Global Behaving At Was Irresponsibly Same Our British
In one vital respect, we are all in Leo Varadkar’s debt, and he deserves a distinguished place in Ireland’s modern history. In another, he will be remembered, I think, for one colossal failure. Both have to do with his background, upbringing, and temperament.
Let me explain. Leo Varadkar will be remembered, oddly, as the best caretaker Taoiseach Ireland ever had. He went into a general election over-full of confidence in January 2020, and it was a disaster. His party lost 15 seats and ended up third.
The only thing that saved him then was that none of the “mainstream” political parties could stomach the arrival of Sinn Féin into government, even though that party had won the largest mandate in the election. While negotiations dragged on for months to try to form an ABSF (anyone but Sinn Féin) government, Leo had to serve as caretaker Taoiseach. And he wasn’t popular — it was widely assumed then that he was on the way out.
In more or less his first month in that job — which would normally be seen as entirely nondescript — covid hit the world. And Leo took charge. He instantly understood the seriousness of the crisis, and immediately took a series of decisions that were unpopular and controversial. But they saved thousands of lives, and he managed with clear authority and great communication to rally the country around them.
At precisely the same time as our caretaker Taoiseach was arming us, as best he could, against a global pandemic, his British counterpart, the wildly popular Boris Johnson, was behaving utterly irresponsibly. It has been estimated that Johnson’s failure to lead in the early weeks of the pandemic cost tens of thousands of British lives and almost destroyed the NHS.
In addition to doing his job as Taoiseach at the time, Varadkar also volunteered his professional medical skills to help overburdened clinical colleagues. That was a mark of the man in crisis and an extraordinary tribute to his middle-class professional upbringing.
But he spent a lot of his time as Taoiseach presiding over a housing crisis that he was temperamentally completely unsuited for. He came from a world in which you saved for a mortgage, maybe got help from your parents, and settled down in your own home with a decent salary at a pretty young age. And he simply never got that it couldn’t be like that for everyone.
More than that, Leo is, was, and always will be, technocratic in his approach. He didn’t create the housing crisis, but it never dawned on him that the only way to solve it was to cut through the endless maze of procedures invented by the bureaucratic mechanisms around him.
I remember him telling me — and I hope he remembers it too — that he was “deeply disturbed” at the lack of progress in regeneration in Dublin, regeneration that would provide thousands of additional high-quality housing units on shovel-ready land already owned by the State.
He went back and asked the questions, for sure, but he found himself unable to drive, to demand, to insist on the labyrinthine procedures being set aside, because this was an emergency.
Confronted with an emergency that a professional with medical training could understand (covid) he knew exactly how to act and lead. Confronted with an emergency that a middle-class and comfortable professional couldn’t understand (housing) he never figured out how to act and lead. And, of course, the way in which the failure to resolve the housing crisis contributed to a growing sense of unease about immigration reflected no credit on his tenure.
You can’t, of course, sum up any politician’s career with a big plus and a big minus. Leo Varadkar will also be deservedly remembered for strong and effective leadership in the aftermath of Brexit.
He didn’t just square up to Johnson, he also masterminded and led an extraordinary Irish diplomatic effort to ensure that we had total solidarity with the rest of Europe throughout every minute of that crisis.
He was brave and outspoken in relation to marriage equality and the Eighth Amendment, although neither of them were issues in which Fine Gael had displayed leadership in the past. And I have to say that the way in which he articulated an independent and strong position on Gaza deserved the support of everyone in Ireland.
I know people who will always remember Leo Varadkar as the man who wanted to be Taoiseach for “the people who get up early in the morning”. He was that too, but a lot more than that. He was complicated and sometimes got things seriously wrong because his instincts and temperament let him down. But when he was playing to his strengths — which was a good deal of the time — he had the capacity to be great. And I hope that’s how he’s remembered.