Tadgh McNally: Fine Gael has good reason to wish Leo Varadkar would just go away
Leo Varadkar and then tánaiste Simon Coveney at the mart in Fermoy, Co Cork, with then agriculture Michael Creed and local candidate for the 2020 general election Pa O’Driscoll.
“I’ve always rejected attempts to create an artificial divide between rural Ireland and urban Ireland — to play one off against the other — East v West, Dublin v the rest.
“We are one nation, and few Dubs are more than a generation or two away from rural Ireland."
These comments weren’t made by some rural TD or minister from out in the country, this was Leo Varadkar back in 2021.
The then-tánaiste was speaking as he launched Our Rural Future, which set out the Government’s plans to develop rural Ireland as the country began to move out of the pandemic.
They were comments typical of a Fine Gael leader, who normally has to balance political messaging between what can be two distinct voter bases, with constituents who lead very different lives.
This sees Fine Gael’s identity as a farmers' party clash with its more middle-class, liberal urban voter base in cities and towns across the country.
The comments are certainly a far cry from what Varadkar told the podcast last week, where, half a decade later, he took aim at rural farming communities.
“People in rural Ireland are very quick to tell people in urban Ireland that, ‘we are the real workers, we’re the ones paying the bills, we’re the ones feeding the country’,” Varadkar said.
“We need to be a little more blunt in urban Ireland and say, ‘actually, that’s not the case. We are the ones paying all the bills, and you are the ones who receive a lot of subsidies and tax benefits that other people don’t get'.”
It’s a much more Dublin-centric sort of comment from the former Fine Gael leader, who is no longer bound by the need to keep a party together.
It does, however, speak to the straight-talking image that Varadkar managed to cultivate throughout his years in the Cabinet.
He may have apologised for the remarks, but he is not resiling from them entirely, standing over his line that much of Ireland’s tax take comes from its cities and towns and not rural areas.
But given the sensitivities following the fuel protests, the remarks have been seen as ill-advised within his own party.
The comments came after a bruising two weeks for the Coalition, with fuel protest anger and Dáil confidence furores.
Undoubtedly, there will be some in urban Ireland who agree with Varadkar’s comments, believing the farmers who brought their tractors up to Dublin and placed the city into a standstill in recent weeks are just never happy with their lot.
But the timing probably couldn’t be worse for Fine Gael, with its rural TDs still smarting after the fuel protests earlier this month.
While he has now apologised for the remarks, it set off a flurry of anger within Fine Gael, with rural TDs taking aim at the former taoiseach.
Agriculture minister Martin Heydon, who served as a junior minister under Varadkar, took issue with his former boss’s comments, describing them as “wrong” and unnecessarily divisive”.
One TD contacted the party’s chairman, Micheál Carrigy, seeking for the party to formally write to Varadkar and call on him to apologise.
While this didn’t materialise due to the apology arriving first, there were stern words for the former Taoiseach at the weekly parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday evening.
Michael Murphy, the first time TD for Tipperary, was said to be particularly aggrieved, using his time at the meeting to hammer Varadkar before hammering him again on Virgin Media’s .
“He should have known better. Words matter,” was how one TD criticised him.
Paula Butterly, the Fine Gael TD for Louth, is particularly scathing of the former Taoiseach’s remarks, describing them as “thoughtless and self-serving”.
She accused him of “stoking the fire of the urban/rural divide”, while putting out a message where if you’re not from Dublin, you don’t matter.
During his time in frontline politics, Varadkar was often a lightning rod for criticism, but this generally did not come from his party’s backbenches.
It speaks to a Fine Gael that has moved on from Leo Varadkar, a party that wants their former leader to get off the stage.
But will he?
Given the former taoiseach’s penchant for media attention, it seems unlikely.
It should have been obvious to political observers he would not simply exit stage right and disappear off to America, spending his days lecturing students in Harvard.
He isn’t taking the same approach as others who have left the role, who vanished mostly from public life and were scarcely heard from.
Many have been happy to fade off into the distance, opting not to wade into day-to-day politics and save their appearances for occasions like the summoning of the Council of State.
Former Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has been totally absent from the political stage since he stepped down as Taoiseach in 2017, even generating controversy through his failure to show up for Dáil votes up until he retired as a TD in 2020.
His only major reemergence in public life came in 2021, when he starred in a six-part RTÉ docuseries on old Irish railway routes — known as Iarnród Enda.
Another former taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, normally spends his time lying low — unless he’s fighting against the Fianna Fáil hierarchy for a run at the presidency.
You generally only hear him nowadays in relation to the Good Friday Agreement, or when he pops up on radio to pay tribute to a former political colleague who has passed away.
Varadkar, meanwhile, has not disappeared off into the sunset. He instead writes a column for the and occasionally makes appearances in podcast and radio studios.
For someone who once took aim at Garret FitzGerald for writing “boring articles” in the , he has ended up on a similar trajectory in quite a short period of time.
The question for Varadkar is does he remain as a regular contributor and commentator on the day-to-day politicking around Leinster House and Government Buildings.
This is a man who, just two years ago, opted to leave politics because he had had enough and in his own words was “no longer the best person for that job”.
Sure enough, he joked at a farewell Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting he was unable to find someone to “stab me in the back, so I fell on my sword instead”.
These ongoing dalliances with the media call into question whether he is in or out.
It is also a headache Fine Gael is wishing did not come when it did, as the party gets its by-election campaign under way in Galway West.
With a sizeable portion of the constituency taking in more rural areas, Varadkar’s comments could end up damaging the party’s best hope at claiming a seat in the two constituencies.
The party’s higher-ups will be hoping any further remarks from the former taoiseach will be more anodyne and keep him off the front pages of the newspapers.
One TD was a lot more forceful about what Varadkar’s next steps should be.
“You’ve abdicated. Away with you.”
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