PLEASE PICK YOUR CABINET CAREFULLY

TAOISEACH’s first Cabinet provides key signs about the nature of his administration. The challenge Varadkar faced was to change how a tired Government looked and operated.

Varadkar had kept expectations low – but that doesn’t mean you have to live down to them. There were, we were told, arguments for keeping the old brigade such as Frances, Richard and Charlie Flanagan. But, outside of the mixed virtue of stability, it was hard to find any.

It was also hard to see the logic behind appointing a Housing Minister to a brief he doesn’t want, a Health Minister to a brief he is trying to escape and promoting Regina Doherty, struggling in a junior job, to the sensitive Social Protection post.

The botched appointment of Mary Mitchell O’Connor was, in terms of political gaucherie, redolent of the Garret FitzGerald era. If Ms O’Connor didn’t like the terms she should have been told where the door was. Tough leaders would have. Leo didn’t.

A more fundamental error was that cabinet selection sets the political mood. Here, after a lot of hubbub, everything landed more or less where it was before, and Leo looked more like an uncertain Theresa May than a reforming Thatcher. VERDICT

An uncertain start that failed to satisfy a desire for change and left Leo vulnerable on the equality front. 5/10