Leo Varadkar’s resignation as Fine Gael leader and Irish taoiseach was as close to a total surprise as modern politics is capable of springing. He is 45 and seems in robust health. Ireland’s economy is in comparatively resilient shape. There is another year to run for the three-party coalition. And, while his political touch had seemed to desert him in the two recent referendum campaigns, Mr Varadkar had not seemed under imminent threat.
In his announcement, Mr Varadkar said his reasons were “personal and political, but mainly political”. Absent further explanation, this implies he meant it when he said that he was “no longer the best person” for the job of securing the re-election of the coalition with Fianna Fáil and the Greens next March. Mr Varadkar has been grappling with healthcare and housing crises, and lost the referendums badly, feeding a slide in popularity. But it is possible the undoubted problem of burnout in modern 24/7 politics may have claimed another victim.
By Thursday, it was becoming likely that Simon Harris, the current education minister, would emerge as both Fine Gael leader and taoiseach. At 37, Mr Harris would be an even younger taoiseach than Mr Varadkar was in 2017. With Sinn Féin still leading the national polls, though not by as much as six months ago, and with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil well adrift, he faces an uphill task. The first big test will come in European parliament elections in June.
Nevertheless, Mr Varadkar’s departure is more than just another political roll of the dice. He may not have always commanded Irish politics, but he has been its highest profile figure, including to the outside world. Gay, mixed race, economically and socially liberal, Mr Varadkar was a generational trailblazer who has now become the youngest ex-taoiseach. As the leader who presided over Ireland’s successful abortion legalisation referendum in 2018, he was seen as emblematic of a new and less conservative Ireland.
Britain’s 2016 vote for Brexit overshadowed Mr Varadkar’s relations with both Belfast and London. He was seen with outright prejudice and suspicion by many Northern Ireland unionists and by some in the Tory party. “Typical Indian,” said the former Ulster Unionist MP Lord Kilclooney. “Why isn’t he called Murphy like the rest of them,” Boris Johnson was alleged to have sneered. A “venomous interloper” was one hardline unionist verdict on Thursday, while a Belfast newspaper dubbed Mr Varadkar “the greenest taoiseach in decades”.
Yet Mr Varadkar stood up both to the unionists and to London when it mattered. It is in no small way down to him that there is now no hard border between north and south. It is his genuine legacy that the revised Northern Ireland protocol remains the basis of UK-Irish trade relations to this day, in spite of perfidious efforts in Belfast and London to overturn it. He stood firm for the good relations with Ireland that are in Britain’s interests too – and he deserves our gratitude for it.
The resignation of the often demonised Mr Varadkar may offer the prospect of a fresh start in relations between the newly re-established Northern Ireland executive in Belfast, under Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, and Dublin. With the imminence of both a UK general election and an Irish one, that may be premature. A long-term reset in UK-Irish relations is much needed. But it will have to await both election outcomes, particularly if Sinn Féin becomes part of a new government in Dublin.
