Book review: Varadkar’s overview of his time in politics carefully avoids his failings

'Speaking My Mind' is a fluid account of Leo Varadkar's life and work and it is an engaging read that touches on politics and public life

Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s struggles with keeping his sexuality from the public glare are detailed in ‘Speaking My Mind’, which moves through his early years and his rise in politics, to eventually reaching the apex of Ireland’s political ladder. Picture: Fran Veale/Julien Behal Photography

• Speaking My Mind 
• Leo Varadkar 
• Sandycove, €29.99

In the Autumn of 2014, I got a call from Leo Varadkar’s media handler. He told me the transport minister, as he then was, wanted to buy me lunch.

I was taken aback, never having even spoken to the minister. Later, the arrangement had to be revised and we met for a drink.

Varadkar was friendly and courteous and eventually told me the reason he asked me to meet. He wanted to thank me for doing my job. 

This was a reference to work I had done on the Maurice McCabe story. I was taken aback again. 

It’s the first time ever a politician bought me a drink to thank me for doing my job, not to mind a minister when the story led to all sorts of problems for the government he was a part of.

He had done his job a few months earlier when he broke with the cabinet narrative of silence on McCabe to declare the garda sergeant and Garda John Wilson as “distinguished”, as he recounts in this memoir. 

That was a crucial juncture on the road McCabe took from vilification to vindication.

Between his declaration on that occasion and the chat I had with him over a drink, I came away a bit confused, but believing that Varadkar was different kind of politician — one who didn’t hide behind platitudes, who called things exactly as he saw them.

That opinion of mine didn’t survive Leo’s two spells as taoiseach. And it fell a little further on reading his memoir.

The first thing to note about it is that he may be speaking his mind but if so, one shortcoming in his thinking is a capacity to apply a little rigour in examining his own career.

Perhaps if he had let a few years pass before putting pen to paper, he could remove himself totally from the aftertaste of the working politician’s natural impulse to justify everything they have done.

Certainly, this fluid account of his life and work is an engaging read that touches on politics and public life. 

It works as an inside account on the goings on in Fine Gael and in government, the latter most especially through the travails of the pandemic in particular, but also Brexit.

His personal background as a kid growing up in west Dublin, the son of an Indian doctor and Waterford mother — allied to his sexuality — sketches out the shy, almost awkward persona that he was in his early adulthood. 

We could have done with a little insight on that phase of his life and how it might have shaped him.

His struggles with keeping his sexuality from the public glare as he made his way through the early straits of politics are well recounted. 

Coming out on national radio

There is no doubt that he broke new ground when he came out and you can almost feel the weight lift off the pages in the aftermath of the declaration on the Miriam O’Callaghan radio show.

The book could have done with a little reflection on whether it is advisable to go into full-time politics at such a young age, as he did. 

He was barely qualified as doctor, with his whole focus on the next move up the greasy pole.

After surviving being on the wrong side of an amateur heave against Enda Kenny, he made it into the cabinet following the 2011 election.

Three years later, he was reshuffled into the health ministry, but then, after the 2016 election, he asked Kenny to move him from that portfolio. 

The money wasn’t there to make the changes he wanted, he claims, and too many election promises had been made.

“I didn’t want to be in the firing line and definitely didn’t want to be blamed for breaking promises I didn’t think we should have made,” he writes. 

So does he think it’s possible for anybody to improve the health service or was it that he was just too busy to bother with it himself?

Efforts to succeed Enda Kenny as taoiseach

When Kenny stepped down, the efforts to succeed him got underway. Varadkar appealed to the party membership’s more red in tooth and claw capitalism instinct, with his reference to wanting to represent people who get up early in the morning. Or did we all get the wrong end of the stick on that one?

“This misrepresented what I was trying to say and what I stood for — though, admittedly, that reading of my remarks would go down well in some quarters,” he wrote.

Sorry, but I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t misrepresented at all and he knew exactly what he was doing in putting that phrase out there.

Brexit was a triumph of his premiership and he is entitled to plaudits, particularly for how he played his opposition number, the odious Boris Johnson. 

He also served the country well through the pandemic, particularly the early phases. His version of the power play between the executive and Nepht, led by Tony Holohan, is pretty even handed.

As he recounts, the government went against Nepht once and got it wrong, so they were reluctant to do so again. 

Any retrospective of that period has to take into account that it was a unique and dangerous time, when lives were at stake and damage was going to be done irrespective of what decisions were taken.

Varadkar was in government for 14 years, right though the beginning and ballooning of the housing crisis. 

That is now, and has been for some time, the most serious challenge in governing this State. 

He writes as if tackling, or at least alleviating, the whole thing was beyond the capability of any government.

“It’s true the government failed to solve the housing crisis, but it’s also true some of our measures could only bring about change over the long term,” he writes.

“Nobody could have fixed Ireland’s housing crisis in a few years.”

This completely avoids responsibility for failing to recognise the problem, for implementing policies that weren’t properly thought out, for not allocating the matter sufficient political capital. 

For instance, he never addresses whether the failure to do any more was associated with the reality that Fine Gael’s natural constituency was probably least impacted by the crisis.

Just as Varadkar wanted out of health because it was too much trouble, so too he allowed Simon Coveney to move from housing when Varadkar defeated him for the leadership. 

It was as if the leading lights in Fine Gael decided there were some elements of governing that they were better off stepping around in case they got burned.

“It is and was a privilege to serve,” is how Leo Varadkar ends his memoir. He is due gratitude for applying his talent to serving, and for self awareness at least in knowing when to get out. 

But he could have enhanced the service further if he gave a more frank account of his time in government, illustrating perhaps for successors where you can go wrong, and when it’s good to admit that perhaps you weren’t nearly always right.

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