Why light-touch Trumpism can’t hide the home truths for Leo

IWONDER does he know? I wonder does Leo Varadkar have any idea of the levels of rage among the populace, about what would broadly be called the housing problem?

Is he aware to any significant extent of how angry people are at the abysmal situation which has been allowed to develop, whereby a regular person with a pretty good job is enduring extra-terrestrial amounts of stress just trying to pay the rent?

Does he connect in any meaningful way with these insidious, soul-destroying realities?

And does he know what vengeance awaits the next time that he and his “lighttouch” Government are standing for election?

I feel that on balance that he probably does know, or at least he has been told about it. I sense that he does know how badly this is affecting people, how it stands there as the perfect illustration of the inertia of Government, how they will always be on the side of those who are least in need.

Because he’s been acting kinda strange of late, saying a few strange things — the sort of things that might almost sound normal coming out of Trump, the sort of things indeed for which Trump is most reviled.

Immigration and climate change are Trumpian specialities, issues which seem to have the capacity to drive him to the limits of his twistedness and his delinquency — yet we have seen Leo making observations in these areas which would not be totally out of synch with the view from Trump Tower.

For example, Leo stated recently that climate change was not without its benefits, such as lower heating bills and fewer deaths due to the warmer winters.

Here was a responsible person chatting away about the upsides of global warming, the kind of stuff that the Trumper throws out to be devoured by the imbeciles at his monster meetings.

Except Leo is not that kind of guy, right?

I mean, we know that Leo is perfectly well aware of the implications of climate change, we know he is not a hooligan like Trump, we know all that, and he knows that we know.

And yet here he was indulging himself in a little light-touch climate change denial, to go with all the other light-touching that is the Government position on so many things — even with a little light-touch dog-whistling thrown in, about Georgian and Albanian migrants.

If the climate change riff was classic Trump, there was another echo in Leo’s special mention of the Albanians and Georgians with their allegedly fake documents, causing a rise in the number of asylum seekers coming here.

I think of the way that Trump singles out a country like “Somalia,” and how he would single out a lot more countries if it didn’t seem to give him such actual physical pain to even mention the names of these terrible places which are not Trumpland.

Leo, of course, is not like that, is he? Sure, he will defend the system of Direct Provision as being “not inhumane”, but he will also say many of the right things about the need to stop scare-mongering, the need to “call out” those who are exploiting these issues for their own dark reasons.

So why he is throwing them that line about the Albanians and the Georgians?

I mean is it humanly possible for any modern leader such as Leo to put out a straight, decent position on these grave matters, without also throwing a few morsels of consolation to the mob?

And then we recall that Leo has been indulging in a bit of light-touch nationalism for some time now, all that loose talk about his various visions of a United Ireland, as if he were having a relaxed chat on Desert Island Discs about where he likes to go on his holidays.

What was all that about? Since Leo must know that the only right thing for any Taoiseach to do about a United

Ireland, is to do or say absolutely nothing whatsoever, he seems to think there is some “percentage” for him to be riffing on this theme.

Indeed he’s been getting away with it too, on Brexit — his finest hour as Taoiseach was the picture of himself and Boris Johnson outside Government Buildings in September, with Leo looking superb and Boris looking like the tramp that he is.

It worked so well, Leo had another triumphant crack at it in October, with the meeting in Liverpool at which, in passing, he bailed out Johnson and left old Ireland with the possibility of a Brexit that is even worse than the Theresa May version. He must have felt that he really needed that picture.

But the one thing he is not getting away with, is the fact that the average monthly cost of renting a home in Dublin, is about two grand.

That there are too many people out there who just can’t pay the rent.

And not even the bright side of climate change is going to change that.

‘The kind of stuff that Trump throws to the imbeciles at his monster meetings...’