It has been a ..more losses Rocky road than wins
»»Steady steer through Covid’s choppy waters »»Controversial leader with errors of judgment
My mum wanted me to be a doc, I wanted to be politician ..I combined
LEO Varadkar always dreamed of a career in politics after announcing he wanted to be Minister for Health when he was just seven.
But he could never have guessed at that age he would realise that ambition and go even further – to the highest office in the land.
A TD since 2007, his rise to Fine Gael leader and then Taoiseach for the first time in 2017 was meteoric.
Born in Castleknock in 1979, Mr Varadkar is the son of an Irish nurse and an Indian doctor.
He told how he wanted to be Minister for Health in an interview: “My mum wanted me to be a doctor like my dad and, at seven, I really wanted to be a politician and I managed in my mind to combine the two.”
He joined the centre right youth wing of the Fine Gael party while studying medicine at Trinity College Dublin.
And as a 28-year-old GP Mr Varadkar quickly made a name for himself when he was first elected in Dublin West.
He was elevated to a frontbench spokesperson almost immediately and became Minister for Transport four years later in 2011 before becoming Minister for Health in 2014 and Minister for Social Protection in 2016.
And at 38, he became the youngest ever Taoiseach after Enda Kenny’s resignation in 2017. He was also the first person from an ethnic minority background to become Taoiseach and
Ireland’s first gay leader. Mr Varadkar came out during a radio interview in January 2015 and said he would be campaigning in support of the same-sex marriage referendum later that year – 22 years after homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland.
He is in a long-term relationship with fellow doctor Matthew Barrett.
His election as Taoiseach was feted as Ireland’s transition from a strict Catholic country to an outwardlooking socially liberal one but Mr Varadkar’s own political views are conservative.
As Social Protection minister he launched a campaign on welfare cheats, is an advocate of free markets and only made known his pro-choice views in the run-up to the historic referendum in 2018 in which Ireland liberalised its strict abortion laws.
He also played a key role in the Brexit negotiations, with a famous meeting with thenprime minister Boris Johnson seen as a significant moment in paving a way for the deal on the UK’S exit from the EU.
Mr Varadkar was Taoiseach at the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 and announced a lockdown in arguably his most famous address while on an annual St Patrick’s Day trip to Washington DC.
In a historic moment, Mr Varadkar told the nation: “We
need to speak about Covid.” He then outlined how schools and many businesses would close as he set in train a series of lockdowns and restrictions that would last almost two years.
Mr Varadkar recently admitted his Government made a mistake by opening up the country in December 2020 to allow for a “meaningful Christmas”, as the virus spread rapidly in that time. But he was generally seen to have steadily steered Ireland through the pandemic.
However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing. The Taoiseach described the recent referendum losses on family and care as “two wallops”. But it was not the first electoral defeat for Fine Gael under Varadkar’s stewardship. Following the resignation of former Housing Minister
Eoghan Murphy in April 2021, Fine Gael lost a seat in the heartland of Dublin Bay South to Labour’s Ivana Bacik.
In the 2020 General Election,
Fine Gael lost 15 seats – despite promising electoral success when he became Taoiseach.
It was a promise he was not always fully able to fulfil. The Taoiseach’s time in office has also seen him involved in controversies.
He faced down a vote of no-confidence after a magazine branded him “Leo the Leak” and revealed he had sent a confidential GP agreement with the Irish
Medical Organisation to
his friend and head of a rival GP group in 2019. Mr Varadkar’s judgement was also questioned by some members of his party when a video of his socialising went viral in 2022 just weeks before he was to become Taoiseach.
At the time, he said: “Everyone makes errors in judgment. But I hope that when it has come to the big calls, whether it was the management of the pandemic. whether it was Brexit, whether it was managing the economy, that I’ve made the right decisions.”
Leo Varadkar’s tenure will be remembered as a rocky road that often saw more losses than wins. But it will be remembered.