Leo is entitled to his day in the sun – he’s flesh and blood like the rest of us Roslyn Dee

WHEN she sat down beside me on alow stool in the bar in the Shelbourne Hotel that summer’s evening I knew that there was something familiar about her. Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt and with her hair pulled back off her face, she was the only female in a group of about five or six others.

They ordered beers and started chatting, the American accents floating out into the high-ceilinged space around me. She was, if I’m honest, a bit strange looking and when she smiled her mouth stretched wide in a way that totally dominated her elfin face.

When the penny finally dropped I couldn’t quite believe it because Julia Roberts – for it was indeed she who was sitting beside me that evening in 1995 – bore little resemblance to the Hollywood actress with the same name. Shorter in stature than I had expected and completely, well, unremarkable, this was obviously the real Julia Roberts and she couldn’t have looked less like the young woman who had first made her mark just a few years earlier in ‘Pretty Woman’. In Dublin for the filming of ‘Michael Collins’ at the time, she also looked nothing like the woman who appeared on screen as Kitty Kiernan when the film was released the following year.

Yet there she was, relaxed, comfortable in her own skin, and, from the snatches of conversation that I could pick up on, obviously very likeable and happy to be one of the gang.

To see someone out of context, however, is a strange experience. Status determines that we put people in boxes and so to identify someone of household-name ilk in their real life, as opposed to their working life, can be difficult to compute.

Last weekend Leo Varadkar spent Sunday afternoon with his partner and a couple of friends. Sticking to the guidelines, he relaxed for a while in Phoenix Park, stripped off to make the most of the warm sunshine, and enjoyed, presumably, some muchneeded downtime. And who, in the current climate, would begrudge him that? Just as it was the real Julia Roberts, having stepped away from the day-job persona, that I encountered in the Shelbourne that evening, so too was it the real Leo Varadkar who pitched up in the sunshine in Phoenix Park. It wasn’t the Taoiseach.

Certain jobs, of course, come with particular responsibilities and to be the prime minister of any country is undoubtedly one of those. But the reality is that we have a young head of government, a gay man in the prime of his life and someone not afraid to be himself. Or be seen being himself. And in a country still struggling under the weight of all the lies, pretence and cover-up that dominated and defined our society for so long, we should be grateful for that.

As it happens, I spotted another member of Cabinet last weekend. He too was out and about in a personal capacity, strolling around his home town in the sunshine with his wife and baby daughter.

When I happened upon Simon Harris last Sunday, there he was outside Mooch, tucking into a small tub of its signature frozen yogurt. Casually dressed and in a situation far removed from that of his day-job, I have to confess that the sight of him still caused me to do a doubletake.

Everyone has two lives. The personal and the professional. And even the so-called ‘famous’ are entitled to both. In the end, however, whether you’re steering your country through a pandemic or hoping for an Oscar nomination, it’s who you are, not what you are, that really matters.