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Catholic Ireland to be the first country with an openly gay Head of Government.

Andalublue

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It looks as if Leo Varadkar has been selected to replace Enda Kenny as the leader of the Irish Fine Gael party, and that means he'll also take over as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister.

Varadkar is the son of a mixed Indian/Irish family and during the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, he talked for the first time about being gay.

Congratulations to him, to Fine Gael and to the Irish people for moving their society in the right direction and for making a positive decision to select the best person for the job, and not just the best white heterosexual for the job. How nice to have a piece of good news to comment on for a change.

Leo Varadkar wins Fine Gael leadership battle, and is set to be next Taoiseach - Independent.ie
 
It looks as if Leo Varadkar has been selected to replace Enda Kenny as the leader of the Irish Fine Gael party, and that means he'll also take over as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister.

Varadkar is the son of a mixed Indian/Irish family and during the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, he talked for the first time about being gay.

Congratulations to him, to Fine Gael and to the Irish people for moving their society in the right direction and for making a positive decision to select the best person for the job, and not just the best white heterosexual for the job. How nice to have a piece of good news to comment on for a change.

Leo Varadkar wins Fine Gael leadership battle, and is set to be next Taoiseach - Independent.ie

It's going to make cross border relations interesting :)
 
New government attire.
96b988a7b0e0dd6b47b8e39b3fad7501
 
It's ironic really - he's actually going to be our most right-wing Taoiseach for decades (which, given the current state of the Irish left, is for the best).
 
It's ironic really - he's actually going to be our most right-wing Taoiseach for decades (which, given the current state of the Irish left, is for the best).

Ah, that's interesting. In what way is he right-wing? I know Fine Gael have always been soft-centre-right and a little less nationalistic than FF or SF, but frankly, I'd never even heard of him before today.

Can you give us a bit of background to this new player on the global stage?
 
Ah, that's interesting. In what way is he right-wing? I know Fine Gael have always been soft-centre-right and a little less nationalistic than FF or SF, but frankly, I'd never even heard of him before today.

Can you give us a bit of background to this new player on the global stage?
Basically, for various historical and practical reasons, Irish politics has always been very populist and pragmatic, with ideology taking a back seat. This was just amplified with partition, which really removed a lot of the ideological diversity that we had. Then, in the aftermath of the Civil War they implemented Single Tranferable Vote to try and keep everyone enfranchised. Whilst STV is very good for making the parliament representative, it also means that politicians have to get as many votes as humanely possible. For the most part of the last century, that meant being devoutly Catholic and thus, conservative socially. However, it also meant many governments were quite left wing economically. It is an onrunning tradition of Irish politics that every government runs the budget in such a way that in the last budget before an election, they go on a spending spree, effectively buying votes. Fianna Fáil were masters of this and they dominated politics like the Republicans did during the Reagan era or the ANC currently does in South Africa.

Three things have effectively caused Varadkar. One is the increasingly liberal nature of the electorate. Internationally people like to emphasise his Indian heritage. But Ireland never really picked up that much racism in the first place, partly due to the fact that Catholics knew full well what it felt like to be institutionally discriminated against and partly due to the simple abscence of ethnic minorities for the most part. As for homosexuality, that simply changed due to massive outside investment, which turned Ireland from one of Europe's poorest states into one of the richest within the space of a few decades. At the start of the last century, what is now the Republic had basically NO industry whatsoever. People outside of Ireland just don't realise how steep of a learning curve Ireland has had to go through.

The second feature that has caused Varadkar is Fianna Fáil themselves. As the dominant party of government and the authors of the Constitution, the blame for the institutional discrimination against LGBT people could be placed on them. Even during the recent same-sex marriage referendum they agonised over it for a while and were only lukewarmly supportive. Meanwhile, they were in power for the boom years. Seeing an opportunity to maintain control, they went bonkers. Spent huge sums of money, much of it wasted through corruption and mismanagement. Economically, they were a conservative's nightmare. Varadkar would've grown up during this. When the country went broke, they were facing a massacre by their working class base already. So there was only so much cutting of public services they could do. Their response? Ratchet up taxes on middle to high income workers. Which included people like Varadkar. This created a huge amount of resentment amongst those voters, who also happen to be the core support of Fine Gael.

The third thing that caused Varadkar was the last government. In what would prove to be effective suicide, the centre-left Labour Party went in with Fine Gael. Whilst this gave the government a huge majority, it tied Enda Kenny's hands. Kenny is basically an old-school Irish politician in every sense of the word. Nevertheless, he ended up having to introduce liberal legislation like same-sex marriage whilst simultaneously blocking him from cutting taxes. Therefore, the party moved to the left socially whilst a huge amount of resentment continued to build up amongst the core vote regarding economic policies. Varadkar, a rising star in the party, got a great brief in Transport, Tourism and Sport. Easy to do well in with any degree of competence. But since Kenny doesn't like Varadkar (he supported a coup against him seven years ago), he reshuffled put him in Health, the poisoned chalice of Irish politics and aptly nicknamed Angola by the previous Prime Minister, due to there being land mines everywhere. But the previous Minister, Reilly, was a disaster and has been dubbed the worst Minister for Health in history. So it was easy to look good in comparison. Varadkar also trained as a nurse, so he has a relatively good grasp of the department. The result? Varadkar came out looking like a competent Taoiseach in waiting at age 38.
 
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This all came together last year. Labour were murdered during the election, their voters splitting off to Sinn Féin. Fianna Fáil absorbed what's left of the socially conservative vote, as well as the anti-government but also anti-Sinn Féin protest vote. Fine Gael was left with an effective monopoly on the middle class, who had nowhere else to go. All the same, they underperformed, probably due to Kenny's unpopularity, which discourages independents. That effectively meant that Kenny lost any chance of getting an annointed successor in. It was clear the next leader would likely need to represent a clean break with him. In the mean time, Kenny stayed on, partly out of a desperation to become the longest serving Taoiseach in Fine Gael history (and the first re-elected) but also because he was already so tainted that he was a useful fall guy for the messy negotiations that created our current minority government. This gave time for Varadkar to lobby the Parliamentary party, which effectively acts as super delegates in leadership elections. He was quickly able to secure the support of fellow Dublin TDs (save Kate O'Connell). This included the shock acquisition of Housing Minister Richard Bruton, who people thought was going to endorse Coveney. He then got loads of other important names, including Paschal Donohoe, the relatively respected Minister for Public Expenditure, and Frances Fitzgerald, the Deputy Prime Minsiter. With those names under his belt, he was able to win the election before it even started.

Varadkar is right-wing in a very economic sense of the word. He's pretty relaxed on social policy, but he's considered pretty hard line on the economy. Varadkar will almost certainly want cut both taxes and public services, and probably substantially at that. His most recent efforts have been cracking down on welfare fraud. That's not a bad thing, but he's the first Taoiseach in years to nail himself down on such a position. It's always been much easier to go with the populist flow. But going with the flow caused the recession and I think Varadkar realises this. Furthermore, he seems to judge politicians in very different terms to his predecessors. Kenny almost certainly put some people in the cabinet out of loyalty. Varadkar, meanwhile, once slammed Garret FitzGerald, an ex-Taoiseach from his own party, in the national parliament for his record on the economy. That's what's important in Ireland about his election - not his race or sexuality - but the fact that he is a very different type of Taoiseach to what we've seen in a long while.
 
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It looks as if Leo Varadkar has been selected to replace Enda Kenny as the leader of the Irish Fine Gael party, and that means he'll also take over as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister.

Varadkar is the son of a mixed Indian/Irish family and during the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, he talked for the first time about being gay.

Congratulations to him, to Fine Gael and to the Irish people for moving their society in the right direction and for making a positive decision to select the best person for the job, and not just the best white heterosexual for the job. How nice to have a piece of good news to comment on for a change.

Leo Varadkar wins Fine Gael leadership battle, and is set to be next Taoiseach - Independent.ie

Fantastic victory for the progressive side of Ireland.
 
It looks as if Leo Varadkar has been selected to replace Enda Kenny as the leader of the Irish Fine Gael party, and that means he'll also take over as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister.

Varadkar is the son of a mixed Indian/Irish family and during the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, he talked for the first time about being gay.

Congratulations to him, to Fine Gael and to the Irish people for moving their society in the right direction and for making a positive decision to select the best person for the job, and not just the best white heterosexual for the job. How nice to have a piece of good news to comment on for a change.

Leo Varadkar wins Fine Gael leadership battle, and is set to be next Taoiseach - Independent.ie

As an Irish citizen, not by birth, I congratulate Leo! Good to see this in a Taoiseach.
 
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