Fine Gael is aiming to head into opposition, says Varadkar

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will meet today for an exchange of policies but Leo Varadkar has insisted his party is aiming to head into opposition.

The party has just finished two days of policy discussions with the Green Party which the Taoiseach said were “very positive and open".

It also emerged that Mr Varadkar wrote to Mary Lou McDonald offering to enter talks but said again he will not go into Government with Sinn Féin.

Mr Varadkar disclosed yesterday that he wrote to Sinn Féin to inform it that he and his party are ready to enter exploratory talks but not talks aimed at forming a government and Mary Lou McDonald has not yet responded.

“I really can't speak for other people, the Social Democrats declined to meet us so I certainly can't speak for them. Sinn Féin has not responded to our offer to meet them. So I can't really speak for them either,” he said.

“What I said for the past two or three weeks is that we will not form a government with Sinn Féin, but we're not refusing to speak to anyone. And we have spoken to Sinn Féin on many matters in the past, lots of different issues and do so regularly.

"So we said we are willing to speak to any party but not about the formation of the government. We are not doing that at the moment. I wrote to Sinn Féin last week to confirm that applied to them as well but we have had no reply,” he said.

In response, Ms McDonald, who is home with her two children who are in isolation as they attend the same school as the individual who has a confirmed case of the coronavirus, confirmed the Taoiseach has been in touch.

She said she has a written response prepared and it is on its way. "My position has been and remains consistent, I want to talk to everybody, I made that commitment throughout the campaign,” she said.

“The Taoiseach has, in fact, been in touch with me twice. He texted. He then wrote to me. Not long after that correspondence, I was very taken aback to see the nature and the tone of his political utterances in a Sunday newspaper. I mean he has said things that are frankly unworthy in my view of the Office An Taoiseach," she said.

“I actually have a letter drafted to the Taoiseach. It's just I got caught very much by surprise over the last 48 hours,” she added.

"One of the main problems in the course of this process so far is that others have in a very high handed and very arrogant way sought not to speak with us and to try and marginalise us.

That's not my form, I don't and we don't believe in that kind of approach," Ms McDonald said.

Mr Varadkar said strategy talks with the Green Party over the past two days went very well.

“We identified the areas where our policies overlap, and there are lots of those and also identified where there are policy differences between the two parties. We focused on the very real constraints that exist in government. If you want to do everything that you want to do, it's never possible to do that because resources are always - whether it's natural resources or human resources - are limited. But they went very well and happened in a very positive atmosphere,” he said.