US President Kennedy arranged for a book to be published in his name in 1956, Profiles in Courage. To honour the quality of current Irish politicians, Macdara hereby inaugurates a new feature for this site: Profiles in Scourge. And who better to start off with than our head of government, though when the present writer sees references to the Taoiseach these days, he admits to having to pause a little while to recall who is currently squatting in the role.

Your correspondent cannot be the only one unable to shake the feeling that An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has become leader of our State only as leverage to return to Washington to intern again for the Republican Party, this time as a Senior Intern. In truth, Macdara would like to get a few hundred words written on the subject of Varadkar but, in the first place, he cannot find much to say, so shallow is the man, and in the second place, he does not want to get a lawyer’s letter with regards to some things he certainly would like to say. Varadkar is undoubtedly an unserious man, an internet creature, which is to say a troll, who failed his way to the top, like, for example, Enda Kenny, except that Kenny took four hundred years to do so whereas Varadkar sank upwards as a youngster. Something else he also managed to accomplish as a youth was to buy a house: “I must’ve been about 24 or 25” he boasted.

He makes reference to Love Actually while visiting Downing Street, he slips a Mean Girls reference into an announcement about Covid. In another Covid speech he relishes saying “not all superheroes wear capes, some wear scrubs and gowns”. He is someone’s embarrassing grand-uncle in the guise of a younger man. In fact one is interested to read that Varadkar is actually 44, older than your correspondent, but much more up for a party than Macdara.

This man has benefitted from being mixed-race, young, and gay, using these demographic facts to disguise his repugnant politics. He has been able to fool some people who should have known better. This is a man who has supported all the familiar positions of the Partitionist Establishment. He was against reproductive healthcare for women until five minutes before the landslide referendum that saw these rights seized by the Irish people—he oddly announced his suddenly updated position in an interview with the English Broadcasting Corporation, presumably looking to impress the foreigners. In 2010 he had said of abortion following rape: 

I wouldn’t be in favour of it in that case, and, you know, first of all, it isn’t the child’s fault that they’re the child of rape. How would that work practically? Would someone have to prove that they’ve been raped? I think where that’s been brought in in countries it has more or less led to abortion on demand.

These are the words of a man who, he admits, “accept[s] a lot of Catholic social thinking”. But Macdara can still recall that people of his acquaintance would say that Varadkar was against the Eighth Amendment, an extraordinary leniency they would never have shown other politicians. When it became clear to Varadkar that he was on the losing side, he said he had come to realise that “things aren’t as black and white as they appear in your 20s”, an odd locution, since people in their twenties—and in their thirties, as he was at the time—were overwhelmingly in favour of reproductive rights. What does it say about this man that his view of being young is that you may cleave to extreme reactionary positions? Every other young person saw abortion as an issue where the law had to be changed not because the issue is black and white, but so as to allow the whole spectrum of grey: no abortions for those who do not want one, abortions for those who do need them.

Varadkar also opposed same-sex marriage, the subject of another celebrated referendum, until he came out five minutes before the landslide referendum that saw us seize our rights on that subject. He is a doctor who oversaw a messy and often confusing response to Covid that necessitated the longest lockdown in Europe (readers should bear in mind that lockdowns are a policy of last resort, representing a failure in the State’s emergency response). On this subject, Macdara would like to point out also how the English-language bias in the Irish media has contributed to the surprising idea that the Irish Government handled Covid quite well, as distinct from the catastrophic, in fact murderous, response of the US and UK administrations; a media more accustomed to looking beyond those two countries would reach a very different conclusion. 

Even short quotes will reveal his craven and fatuous Law and Order Liberalism:

I would be a little bit uncomfortable about accusing Israel, a Jewish state, of genocide given the fact that six million Jews – over half the population of Jews in Europe – were killed. That certainly was a genocide. A genocide is defined, as you know, as a deliberate attempt to eliminate an entire population or a large part of it. I would just think we need to be a little bit careful about using words like that unless we’re absolutely convinced that they’re the appropriate ones.

This is a typical Varadkar non-intervention, designed to put him right in the middle of the road: it is a little bit uncomfortable to express opinions, we have to be a little bit careful about such things; the detour into perfectly well-known history is intended firstly to spin out more words, and secondly to signal to imagined US masters that he will work within their limitations, notwithstanding the fact that none of them are paying any attention to him. It reads to this writer more like the work of a lazy opinion columnist who feels they must tackle a big Topic, or like the words of a nineteen year old standing in a student election, delivering speeches to his parents in the kitchen.

Varadkar also leaked a confidential contract between the State and an organisation representing GPs, to a rival GP group, which, aside from being an offence against the office of Tánaiste that he occupied at the time, was also an interference in his background profession, to which he is surely likely to return, unless the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Labour-Green Party can catapult him to Brussels. It feels unlikely to this writer that Varadkar would fit in there. Send him back to making sandwiches in DC.