‘I am no longer best man to be Irish PM’, said a BBC headline this week, summarising Leo Varadkar’s resignation speech. The truth, Leo, is that you were never the best man to be Irish PM. He was never elected by the people to be taoiseach, instead securing that seat of power by appointment and backroom dealing. And once there, once he’d been gifted the highest office in the land by his allies in Dublin 4, he wielded government not for the people, but against them. He bent Ireland to what was essentially a vast real-time experiment in social re-engineering and thought control.
An unelected ruler using his power and clout to correct the country and improve the people? There’s a word for that. And it isn’t ‘democracy’.
Varadkar announced his resignation on Wednesday. In an emotional speech he said he was stepping down as leader of Fine Gael immediately and will step down as taoiseach once his successor has been chosen. His ‘shock departure’ followed the people’s crushing defeat of the twin referendum he put forward. Overwhelming majorities rejected his proposals to alter the Irish constitution to update its definition of ‘family’ and to fix what Varadkar damned as its ‘very sexist’ reference to a woman’s ‘duties’ in the home. No thanks, said the electorate, in the biggest ever referendum loss by an Irish government.
Even the fact that Varadkar’s stepping down is widely seen as a ‘shock move’ speaks to the haughtiness, the outright unworldliness, of his political kind. To many of us it makes perfect sense that a PM would bugger off after suffering a historically unprecedented bloody nose from voters. But it seems the Varadkar clique thought they could ride it out. ‘No biggie’ was their view. Until his ‘shock departure’ on Wednesday, reports the Guardian, ‘the political fallout from the [referendum] debacle had widely been expected to be limited’.
Who expected that? I’m sure those voters who gleefully seized the opportunity of the referendum to give the middle finger to Varadkar and the rest of the establishment didn’t expect the impact of their discontent to be ‘limited’. It is a testament to the arrogance of technocracy, to the chasm that has emerged between Ireland’s rulers and Ireland’s ruled, that the Dublin establishment thought it could shrug off the largest drubbing it has ever received from voters.
In the end, tellingly, it seems it was disgruntlement from within his own party ranks, rather than the disgruntlement of the oiks, that convinced Varadkar to go. He was facing ‘increasing discontent within Fine Gael’, with some party bigwigs worried he’s an ‘electoral liability’. Everything you need to know about the man is contained in the fact that he essentially shrugged when the masses rose up against him but bolted when his fellow clerisy members criticised him. To the technocrat, the disapproval of their dinner-party circle carries far more weight than the discontent of ordinary people.
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Author: Ruth King
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