Maybe it is a warning shot across the bows of his naysayers, or book reviewers, or just his strong sense of self, but Leo Varadkar begins this book with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, US president from 1901 to 1909: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena ... and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
Roosevelt made this speech at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910 under the title Citizenship in a Republic. As a 38-year-old taoiseach in 2017, ambitious, gay and biracial, Varadkar’s ascension raised intriguing questions about citizenship and the evolving Irish republic in the early 21st century. The promoters of this book, written by Varadkar and ghostwriter Deirdre Nuttall, are marketing it as an intimate and revealing portrait of a “singular” and “iconic” public figure who helped to deliver “transformational change” and is now freed “from the constraints of office”.
As an introverted child, “in the more affluent end of Blanchardstown”, Varadkar had “an unusual obsession with politics”, growing up with an Indian father, a GP; and an Irish mother, a nurse; where “being half Indian didn’t impinge on me much”. He was drawn to Fine Gael as the party “seemed the perfect blend of progressiveness and prudence”, though there is no real probing of what brought him to such certainty. He interned for the Fine Gael TD Frances Fitzgerald aged 16, while a student at the private school King’s Hospital, was co-opted as a councillor on Fingal County Council in 2003 while training to be a doctor, and elected a TD in 2007.
In a hurry and always eyeing political advancement, “people found me arrogant and insensitive ... but I’m glad that’s who I was”. The arrogance endures; he praises himself for predicting the economic crash and is proud of Fine Gael “for having the courage and integrity to point out that things were going wrong”. It was destined, the script goes, to clean up after Fianna Fáil’s incompetence and profligacy. No need to mention that some in the party had demanded more spending during the boom.
READ MORE
In the Dáil in 2010 he attacked the legacy of Garret FitzGerald who, he said, “effectively destroyed the country” when taoiseach in the 1980s. He regrets such infantile crassness: “If there’s any 20 seconds of my political career I could delete, it would be that.” He nonetheless enjoyed the media exposure that came with being a Fine Gael rottweiler and suggests his allergy to bonhomie also meant he was averse to sycophancy.
He served in various ministries – transport, health, social protection – and lists his achievements and frustrations in those roles. He is rightly proud of efforts to ensure a living wage, increased social protection, greater access to healthcare and better health outcomes, though he offers little analysis of the health service’s dysfunctions beyond asserting it “wasn’t an efficient bureaucracy”.
His closeted homosexuality made him more puritanical and judgmental, as he wondered: “If I can deny myself what I really want, why the hell can’t you?” When he decided to come out publicly on RTÉ Radio in 2015, he was “changing my life forever”. It is much to his credit that he had the courage to do that, hoping “nobody among the next generation of politicians would ever feel the need to do an interview like that”. That is a significant legacy.
There are numerous controversies for Varadkar to either elide or confront more meaningfully. He stood up for whistleblowing garda Maurice McCabe and brought fire to Enda Kenny’s belly by being involved in a mismanaged heave against him. Some of his perceived gaffes were born of an admirable tendency to be franker than most politicians, but in throwing his ideological shirts in the wash, they come out with various shades: “centre right” or “trending towards the more liberal end of the centre-right spectrum”, whatever or wherever that is. He settles on “the socially liberal, pro-enterprise, financially responsible, outward-looking centre right”.
He likes to give the “rag tag group of hard left bullies” a good kicking. He is adamant he is a champion of social housing and compassion, but it is trite to argue that “means-testing shouldn’t apply to children. They have no personal income.” Maybe it is the parents’ income that matters. At a private meeting with Barack Obama, “I discovered that we were like-minded on all the big issues”, but what does that actually mean?
As taoiseach in 2017-2020 and 2022-2024, he embraced the end of Civil War politics and faced the challenges of managing changed attitudes to abortion (“we elevated women’s voices”), the Brexit fallout, the Covid pandemic and tensions over immigration. There is gossip, revealing text exchanges and entertaining titbits on his encounters with Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Donald Tusk and Nigel Farage, as well as versions of his many exasperated exchanges with his chief of staff, Brian Murphy, and press adviser, Nick Miller, over perceived and actual unfairness in media coverage and managing controversies.
He handled the visit of Pope Francis in 2018 well, with a strong speech and the right tone. Cabinet confidentiality is honoured, but some of his private conversations with Green Party leader Eamon Ryan are covered, as is his detached relationship with “cautious” Micheál Martin.
There is plenty of interesting but still too breezy detail on the Brexit fallout negotiations, and there is a particular preoccupation with the optics, even retrospectively. He managed Anglo-Irish tensions and the Border dilemma adroitly, and this inflated his ego: “History was being made, and I was at the centre of it. I was, I felt, the right person in the right job at the right time.” But the reflections are lacking depth; he is too reliant on newspaper accounts of turning points and rehashing delivered speeches.
He is adamant his leaking of a draft new fee deal with GPs to the National Association for General Practitioners in 2019 was a “so-called leak”, but is able to acknowledge that Independent TD Catherine Connolly asked the most pertinent question “When did you decide you were sorry? After you did it or when you got caught?” The toll it took on him was significant, as he was twice questioned by gardaí under caution, though no charges were brought.
The reader gets a good sense of the pressures of serving as taoiseach and dealing with the unexpected. With the arrival of Covid, he was “wielding power as never before” but so was chief medical officer Tony Holohan, whom he describes as “intelligent, refined and quite arrogant” and one who “overreached”. The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) for Covid-19 was “even leakier than the Dáil” and though he regrets questioning some of its members’ motivations, he is critical of inconsistencies regarding pandemic restrictions, and “poor modelling” and “pessimism bias” in relation to Covid’s trajectory.
As to his ministerial colleagues, he occasionally praises Simon Harris – “he reminds me of myself”- but is lukewarm about Eoghan Murphy. Helen McEntee taught Varadkar a few lessons; he was surprised she wanted six months’ maternity leave and suggested instead she resign for six months: “I don’t think I should have to resign because I’m having a baby,” McEntee replied.
Varadkar has recently been vocal about preparing for Irish unity; Micheál Martin “studiously didn’t want to talk about a united Ireland or constitutional change” but Martin’s approach “proved that being generous to hardline unionists never results in more than a pat on the head”. These are interesting fault lines, but in keeping with a certain detachment about matters of substance, what Varadkar envisages Irish unity to look like is left unexplained.
He offers thoughtful reflections on immigration and the emotional impact of the 2023 Dublin riots, but it will displease many that he believes “the only area where we were seriously underperforming was the environment” and that “so many of the major issues that had been impacting Ireland had been resolved, or largely so”. He is dismissive of economists and insists his time in office was partly about ending Irish cycles of economic boom and bust, but he does not give the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and its various pointed warnings a single mention.
Having embraced his sexuality and wanting to have a good time socially, Varadkar found the media intrusions suffocating, and writes revealingly about the mental consequences. He was “sick of the idea that politics was everything ... everyday I was a little more Taoiseach and a little less me”. This created a “low level of anxiety. You never know when some action, comment or omission might be revisited, judged afresh or used against you.”
He wanted “to be able to live my own life, my way”. You cannot do that if you are taoiseach; it is the price of power. Varadkar is justified in feeling aggrieved that footage of him picking his nose on the way in to Westminster Abbey for the coronation of King Charles III became a social media video by the time he had sat down in the abbey, but his partner’s boorish posts on Instagram during that ceremony, which Varadkar acknowledges were inappropriate, are a reminder that modern media projection is a two-way street. It is refreshing that younger politicians are deciding they do not have to be “lifers” but they also need to be less narcissistic.
This is a jaunty book, with lots of exclamation marks, but is at times superficial and lazy. He refers to “the blank I’m drawing about my maiden speech” in the Dáil. He could have looked it up, but it seems making it was more important than what it was about. Eoghan Murphy’s memoir, Running from Office, published last year, is a more astute book. Varadkar too often relies on cliche and stating the obvious: in the Department of Health there were “no easy answers”; “referendums can be very divisive”; “Coveney and I were in a race that would take only one of us over the finishing line”, or “Sinn Féin maintains an abstentionist policy towards Westminster, so their MPs don’t attend”.
Varadkar maintains “I’d had the hopes, fears and worries of 5 million people on my shoulders”. Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest US president aged 42, carried the weight of 88 million people, and stayed longer in a much tougher arena.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD. His book, The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, has just been published in paperback by Profile Books
