AND NOW FOR THE HARD PART
“He definitely doesn’t do anything outside of politics,” the friend says.
A former colleague agrees: “He eats, drinks, sleeps and smokes politics all hours of the day.”
For the record, Harris does not smoke — though one friend recalls him asking for a cigarette at a particularly raucous party conference. He is partial to a bottle of Corona, though, and, according to former minister Finian McGrath, he is a “moderate” drinker.
“He’s completely different to Leo. He lives and breathes politics, he gets his energy from it. Harris loves the gig. I think he’s in it for life. Even if he just got one shot at taoiseach, he’ll still be around after it,” McGrath says.
In fact, all the friends, allies and former colleagues who spoke with the Sunday Independent believe that, unlike Varadkar, Simon Harris will be a political lifer, no matter how long he serves as taoiseach.
He was first elected to the Dáil in 2011 at the age of 24. His precociousness was evident to all who encountered him in Leinster House, and he carved out a reputation as a tenacious inquisitor on the Public Accounts Committee.
With his media profile soaring, it was no surprise when, in 2014, Enda Kenny made him a junior minister at the Department of Finance.
The plaudits were gushing, bordering on embarrassing. One Fine Gael colleague — never brave enough to put their name to such a preposterous statement — labelled him the “White Obama”. Even the late Gay Byrne declared on his radio show that Harris had left him “gasping in admiration”.
A Fine Gael backroom veteran remembers: “I don’t think I ever had a cross word with him, never saw him in bad form or be unpleasant to anybody — which is unusual for a minister.”
When the Fine Gael-Independent minority government was formed in 2016, Enda Kenny found himself in a bind when Leo Varadkar kicked up a fuss about remaining in Health. So Kenny turned to Harris — who, at 29, was shocked to be offered the job.
On the night of the appointment, a jubilant Kenny was overheard in the gents of The Ginger Man pub — where Blueshirts had gathered to toast his historic second term — lauding “young Harris” as the man to cure what ailed the health service.
A stunned Harris said he would give it “awful welly”, but his four years in Health were troubled. Waiting lists soared, as did the budget for the new National Children’s Hospital. Many of the targets Harris set were missed, none more damaging to this day than the undelivered commitment that no child would be waiting longer than four months for scoliosis surgery.
Then there was the CervicalCheck crisis, when scores of women diagnosed with cancer were not told an earlier audit had uncovered inaccuracies in
BE ELECTED TAOISEACH
A foregone conclusion, but Harris will want to be elected by as many TDs as possible in order to bolster him, particularly when he is being crowned without an election or an internal contest. Expect meetings with TDs in the various Independent groupings in the Dáil and some soothing words about their various policy and constituency priorities in the coming days.
RESHUFFLE
Leo Varadkar has openly admitted finding this part of the job very difficult. Harris’s allies want him to be bold and ruthless. How can he freshen up the Cabinet when political realities dictate that veterans such as Heather Humphreys and, most likely, Paschal Donohoe must be retained? Simon Coveney could be gone, with Peter Burke the most hotly tipped for promotion. None of these decisions will be easy and could have consequences down the line.
BACK TO BASICS
Fine Gael TDs and senators speaking to Harris in recent days have implored him to get the party back on track by focusing on small business, rural Ireland and law and order. He is constrained by the Programme for Government and the tripartite coalition — but as taoiseach, he decides what to prioritise over the next year.
GET A BOUNCE
Harris will hope the twopoint bounce for Fine Gael in today’s Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll is the beginning of a sustained rise in support for his party that can be maintained right into the local and European elections and beyond that into a general election.
FIVE MORE YEARS
His hardest task will be convincing a sceptical public that after nearly 14 years of Fine Gael in government, the party deserves a historic fourth term after the next general election, which is likely to be next year. For all his youth and vibrancy, Harris has been in Cabinet for most of the last decade. It will be no easy task. their smear tests. It convulsed politics and scandalised the public.
Harris’s first instinct was to reach out to the woman who broke the story and became a national hero — the late Vicky Phelan. Such empathy saw Phelan declare in 2019 that she would love to see him become taoiseach.
This is where Harris excels. He has, says one ally, a “natural compassion”.
But how the minister handled the crisis tainted him for ever in the Department of Health and the HSE, and his relationship soured with senior civil servants. These included chief medical officer Tony Holohan and an enraged HSE boss Tony O’Brien, who was furious that Harris effectively sacked the head of the national screening service.
O’Brien would later label Harris “a frightened little boy” who “runs scared of headlines”.
The criticism stung, in part because it had a ring of truth. Harris could not but have feared he would be collateral damage in the political fallout from CervicalCheck. A friend said he had to react in a crisis when officials were too slow. Another says Harris’s first move when Phelan went public was to find her number and call her. “It’s a sound political instinct,” they added.
But his political instincts have not always served him well. He backed Simon Coveney for the leadership of Fine Gael seven years ago, and was isolated as the only cabinet minister to do so. Varadkar was privately advised to sack him, but he kept him in Health, where he continued to toil. It was punishment of sorts.
That said, Harris’s signature achievement was shepherding the passage of the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, for which he received great acclaim from the masses of campaigners seeking a more liberal abortion regime in Ireland.
That he had pledged to oppose any change to Ireland’s ban on abortion when he ran for the Dáil in 2011 was largely forgotten.
“Nothing with Harris is more than skindeep in terms of beliefs,” says one TD who noted that Harris did not involve himself in the recent referendum campaigns.
“He figured early on that these had the mark of loser about them.”
Harris has both fallen victim to and benefited from events beyond his control. In January 2020, his struggles in Health saw the opposition move to table a motion of no confidence in him. It precipitated a snap general election. However, Fine Gael’s disastrous result was soon forgotten when the Covid19 pandemic broke out in the early spring of that year.
Harris went from being one of the most unpopular health ministers in memory to a national icon of sorts. Children wrote to him, saying how they missed school, and a growing Instagram following swooned over his every word in his video updates on the pandemic response
As hundreds died, the health minister was never more popular. Did it make him uncomfortable?
“I’m probably engaged in — jeez, I certainly hope so — the biggest challenge of my life and probably the lives of everyone in this country, and I just want to do it as best I can,” he told the Sunday Independent at the time.
The formation of the current Coalition offered Harris a way out of Health — though he insisted he would have stayed — and he was consigned to the political backwater of Further and Higher Education. From there he could dole out good news about grants, accommodation and apprenticeships. But no one was under any illusions as to what the real game was.
On Friday, Harris attended a Fine Gael coffee morning in Lucan and then did an impromptu walk up the street, popped into a beauty salon and chatted to women getting their hair washed. “We have a guy who loves that shit,” said one TD. The contrast with the more aloof and awkward Varadkar is clear.
“He knows we have to get back to basics. He’ll do that straight away and everybody’s telling him that — law and order, the selfemployed and farmers, the core Fine Gael vote,” said a second TD.
This chimes with Harris’s thinking. In the coming days he will talk about driving down costs for businesses and families, and put a renewed focus on law and order.
Nearly all of his backers are urging him to be radical in his cabinet picks. In their eyes, Simon Coveney is doomed.
“Coveney is so far removed from reality it’s unf **kingbelieveable. He doesn’t want to see the son of a taxi driver become taoiseach,” was the scathing and probably unfair assessment of one former minister.
Paschal Donohoe might also have been for the chop, were it not for his role as president of the Eurogroup. He is considered safe, but Helen McEntee could be moved sideways out of Justice.
Harris may share many common traits and a similar career path with Varadkar, but he has made it clear privately to allies that his leadership style will be very different, pitching it as “Enda Kenny with a twist”.
One TD fielding calls from fretting local election candidates after Varadkar resigned told them soothingly: “This is your f **king Christmas, lads. Even with a small bounce over the next few weeks, that’s ye over the line.”
Harris believes the party became far too much about Leo Varadkar in recent years, and he will encourage and welcome dissent from the lower ranks.
That’s easily said now, of course — in a honeymoon phase that will most likely be brief.