Leo leaves on high ...of homelessness, house prices & rent
LEO Varadkar’s party colleagues are correct when they claim that the Taoiseach leaves office on a high.
His record in government speaks for itself as he leaves behind the highest number of homeless, the highest house prices and the highest ever rents.
What is perhaps the most shameful statistic of all is the one that shows the country has the highest number of young people in Europe aged between 18 and 34 still living at home with their parents.
It is a shocking irony that this dreadful demographic along with the lowest home ownership in 50 years came about on the watch of a Taoiseach who claimed he stood for “people who get up early in the morning”.
The reality is he abandoned the working and middle classes and instead came under the sway of unelected lobby groups and NGOS.
There have been some successes on his watch such as the relatively stable economy but even that is now threatened by a lack of housing.
Perhaps Varadkar’s greatest failure is he leaves behind a polarised society which feels alienated from the Government.
The Coalition’s disastrous open borders policies have been roundly rejected by the public who were branded as right-wing extremists when in fact Varadkar himself warned of the dangers of mass migration over a decade ago.
While his supporters might say he was one of the best taoisigh and detractors claim he was one of the worst he was certainly one of the most divisive in recent years.
His bogus “Welfare Cheats Cheat us All” claims in the Fine Gael leadership election set the tone for his two terms as Taoiseach, alienating huge swathes of the electorate.
In short, he was given the chance to change his country and he certainly did, but for the worse. Already many Fine Gael TDS see the writing on the wall with 10 jumping ship and possibly another five or more heading for the lifeboats before the party founders on the rocks of a General Election.
For a party leader to throw in the towel just 12 weeks from important elections is unheard of and has raised suspicions.
No doubt the prospect of being the first sitting Taoiseach to lose his seat must have been a consideration.
The fact this country doesn’t do political accountability is another reason eyebrows have been raised. If that was the case Roderic O’gorman would have resigned after the disastrous referenda he championed.
When questioned about Varadkar’s achievements even Fine Gael colleagues struggle to find any notable success apart from his handling of “Covid” and “Brexit”.
But imposing Europe’s harshest lockdowns and renewing already existing trade agreements with our neighbour are not much to boast about.
He has also been rightly criticised for a near obsession with himself and his Government being seen in a positive light, setting up a taxpayer-funded spin unit to do just that.
In a way Simon Harris is the perfect replacement as he is the living embodiment of spin over substance whose broken promises to suffering scoliosis children and the Cervicalcheck scandal will forever haunt him.
Just hours before the Taoiseach’s bombshell announcement his party colleague Ciaran Cannon also said he would not fight the next election, claiming “there’s a toxicity in politics now”.
He’s not wrong but unfortunately it’s largely Fine Gael’s policies over the past 13 years which have poisoned the political waters.
Varadkar is not a bad man and neither are the members of his Government and they should not be subjected to personal abuse.
While everyone has a right to robustly criticise politicians, for now at least, this should be done in a civil manner and without menace or threats.
The overwhelming rejection of the referenda was a clear indication of just how out of touch the Government is.
To use a football term, it’s not that they have lost the dressing room, they have lost the stadium.
Varadkar is politically astute enough to realise the game was up and decide to go rather than face the humiliation of being pushed by the voters.
As for democracy, Aontu leader Peadar Toibin summed it up when he said “we are about to get a Taoiseach rejected by the people replaced by a Taoiseach unelected by the people”.
Such is the nature of Irish
politics.
To throw in the towel 12 weeks from elections is unheard of