TAOISEACH WHO

From a mixed-race heritage to doctor to top of Government

ACOUPLE of years ago, back when it was his turn to be Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar appeared as a guest on the RTÉ television series All Walks Of Life.

Filmed strolling along St Declan’s Way in Waterford with the host, former president Mary McAleese, he discussed his upbringing and how it had shaped his values and beliefs.

It was an illuminating insight into a man whose life path was not typical of most other Irish politicians.

He spoke candidly about how it felt growing up in a middle-class Dublin suburb, the son of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse. How his mixed-race heritage in ’80s Ireland, when it was ‘very white, very Catholic’, led him to experience a sense of ‘othering’ and resulted in him failing to fully embrace his Indian background.

‘I did grow up in what was a very monocultural Ireland, very white, very Catholic, I was the guy with the dark skin and the funny name,’ he explained. ‘And even though I don’t think I was ever subjected to any kind of racial violence or anything like that, there is an othering when you’re of colour.’

Perhaps it’s not surprising he was spared any blatant or cruel racism, as the housing estate where his family lived in Blanchardstown is in a ‘good area,’ and the private secondary school he attended, King’s Hospital, is unlikely to have tolerated any kind of overt bigotry from its pupils.

It probably also helped that his parents, Ashok and Miriam, ran a busy and successful general practice from their home in Roselawn, and the Varadkars are a wellknown, well-liked family within the community.

Leo Varadkar, however, ‘definitely’ did feel different.

‘It’s often just the kind of little things, you know, the kind of thing where people ask you where you’re from,’ he explained to Ms McAleese. ‘Often one you’d get asked is: do you ever go back to India?

‘You know, I was born in the Rotunda, I grew up in west Dublin, I don’t go back to India anymore than I go back to Waterford or whatever. No harm is meant by it. It’s just ignorance in many ways but it does make you still feel different.

‘I suppose the main thing I wanted to do was to fit in. This is long before I realised I was gay as well so that kind of came down the line later on.

‘But that’s one of the reasons why I probably didn’t take much of an interest in India or being half Indian because I think most kids just want to fit in.’ He may have wanted to fit in, but it is very possibly this sense of ‘othering’ that set Varadkar off on his extraordinary trajectory through the Irish political landscape, and which yesterday saw him hailed in global media as a ‘barrier breaking Taoiseach’ and the face of ‘Ireland’s rapid modernisation’.

It would seem he always had lofty aspirations, and he has often recounted how as a nine-year-old boy he ‘embarrassed’ his mother by announcing he wanted to be health minister.

He further surprised his parents by joining Fine Gael when he was 16 years old.

‘Neither of my parents are involved in politics or anything like that but my dad is political certainly and we would have talked about politics and religion and all those things you are not supposed to talk about around the dinner table.’

His parents met while working in a hospital in Slough in the UK. While his father is from India, his mum is from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. They married in 1971 and their first child, Sophia, was born in England, shortly before they moved to India for a few years. By 1973 they had settled in Dublin, where their second daughter, Sonia, was born. Their youngest child, a son called Leo, was delivered at the Rotunda Hospital in January 1979.

The family home in north Dublin also housed their fledgling GP practice.

‘In the early days patients came to the front door,’ Varadkar has explained. ‘The sitting room was the waiting room and the garage was converted into the surgery. My mom, being a nurse, was the manager. She did pretty much everything other than see the patients.’

After finishing at the local St Francis Xavier National School, Varadkar was sent to King’s Hospital in Palmerstown, where he has admitted he was a swotty student, and where fellow pupils described him as very intelligent and always a bit ahead of the class, but otherwise very normal.

Despite the fees required for King’s Hospital, he has said his family lived a fairly modest life as his parents worked hard to build up their practice.

For years they went without any holidays abroad, and for more than a decade they drove the same Ford Cortina.

He was 14 years old when they made his first trip back to his father’s birthplace in Mumbai. He admitted he found that first visit to a Third World country overwhelming, but a return trip when he was studying medicine in university was much more successful.

He started at Trinity College in

He was 14 years old when he made the trip to Mumbai

Dublin as a law student, but after his Leaving Certificate results were rechecked and his points increased, he switched to medicine. He was an energetic member of Young Fine Gael, becoming vice-president of the Youth of the European People’s Party, the junior wing of the Christian Democrat group, and forming a lifelong friendship with party colleague Lucinda Creighton. An RTÉ television report, posted on social media yesterday, shows one of his first ever inter views as a 20-year-old aspiring politician in April 1999.

Wearing a blue checked shirt, the medical student is impressively assured as he explains how he’d always ‘realised a doctor can only help a certain amount of patients while the Minister for Health can really change things’.

After graduating from medical school in 2003 he began working as a junior doctor in Connolly Hospital, near his home in Blanchardstown.

A career in politics, however, was still his number-one ambition and in 2004 he was co-opted on to Fingal County Council.

Indeed, working as a doctor was never really his passion, as he explained in an interview with Hot Press magazine.

‘Looking back, the real reason why I did medicine was because it was the family business,’ he said. ‘It was kind of what I was expected to do.

‘I didn’t like studying medicine for the first few years and that’s how I got more involved in politics, particularly in college debating, all that kind of stuff.

‘It was really only in the clinical years, when I started getting into hospitals, that I actually started to like it.’

For the next couple of years he juggled his punishing work hours as a junior doctor with his county council duties, and was duly rewarded by Fine Gael when he was supported in his bid at the general election of 2007. At the age of 27 he won a seat.

From almost the beginning he was tipped as one to watch, and despite his involvement in the heave against then leader Enda Kenny in 2010, he was advanced to the front-bench.

His style was decidedly blunt and plain-spoken.

Those who came across him in those early years described him as ‘socially awkward’ and lacking the usual political skills of being able to engage in small talk or ‘work the room’.

But these very attributes also won him fans, and he scored high with public approval when he stood up for Garda whistleblowers who’d revealed how officers were routinely wiping out penalty points for friends and family.

From 2011 to 2014 he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, and proved his dogged commitment to whatever his brief was by taking up running and brushing up on his Irish language skills to help enhance his understanding of his portfolio.

It had other benefits: he would later reveal that at one point in his early political career his weight ballooned to 17.9 stone and a 40-inch waist. But thanks to his determination to follow through on advice doled out by his various ministerial offices, he turned his health around and became an avid runner and gym user, which he continued when he was appointed Health Minister in 2014.

The following year came another career-defining moment for Varadkar when he announced, on his 36th birthday, that he was gay during a radio interview with RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan.

‘Looking back I always knew – but I didn’t know maybe until a year or two ago,’ he told her. ‘I’m not sure why that is or was, but it’s just the way it is.

‘Then there was the fact that all my friends are settling down and I began to wonder what the future holds for me. Did I really want to be alone? And that helped me open up to the idea that life could be different.’

Varadkar was hailed for his honesty and courage, and afterwards was deemed to seem more at ease in public, raising his profile and helping to boost his popularity. He also introduced his boyfriend, handsome Mayo man Dr Matt Barrett, who currently works as a cardiologist at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin.

In 2016, after leaving the Health ministry, a role Varadkar failed to sparkle in, he was given the Social Protection brief.

Although this was seen as a demotion, some believe it gave him the chance to foster stronger relationships with his party’s TDs and county councillors.

When it came time for Enda Kenny to step down, Varadkar was in an excellent position to plead his case to become the next leader of Fine Gael.

He beat Simon Coveney and a few days later was voted in as the new Taoiseach.

And while there have been triumphs, most notably his steadying and unifying leadership during the pandemic, there have also been disasters: the housing crisis has locked a generation out of home ownership, while the health service is still a mess.

But there’s no denying he enjoyed a colourful stint at the top, from his handwritten letter to Australian pop princess Kylie Minogue, offering to welcome her to Ireland personally when she played a concert there, to comparing snazzy socks with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, to sparking a debate about the right to privacy and the regulation of social media when a clandestine filmed video of him socialising in a nightclub went viral.

On his wander through Waterford with Mary McAleese back at the start of 2021, he admitted to having regrets.

‘Everyone makes mistakes and one of my character flaws is sometimes I’m too blunt and I say things that come across insensitive when they’re not intended that way,’ he said.

‘I’m just being blunt. So, I’m sure there’s lots of things I could have done better.’

And when asked about the negative press he often received, he told her: ‘Nobody likes criticism, but sometimes your critics are right. And you do have to sometimes consider that, that maybe what they’re saying about you is true.’

He added: ‘But that’s why you do need a few people who are on your side.

‘And you know when they come to you with something that you’ve got wrong, you can trust them.’

He was described as socially awkward