This afternoon, the Republic of Ireland’s main ruling party will likely have its first openly gay leader, with Leo Varadkar almost certain to become the next prime minister — or Taoiseach, as the head of the Irish government is known. He has an unassailable lead in Fine Gael’s leadership contest and his subsequent approval as Taoiseach by the Irish parliament is all but assured.
With Varadkar facing off against Simon Coveney, the 38-year old has broad majority support within the ranks of the Fine Gael parliamentary party and has drawn popular support from the rank and file members across the country of 4.6 million during polling over the past ten days.
If elected leader of the party, Varadkar would still face a formal ratification vote to become Taoiseach in the parliament where his party is the largest member of a coalition government. Varadkar’s election is all the more remarkable given that homosexuality was outlawed in Ireland until 1993, and divorce was only introduced two years later in what was an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, where 95 per cent of the population subscribed to traditional church teachings.
But Varadkar also shows another face of an Ireland that has irrevocably changed in two decades. Not only would he be the youngest Taoiseach, he would also be the first born to an immigrant father. Varadkar’s father, Ashok, was born in Mumbai and became a doctor and practised medicine in the United Kingdom. There he met a nurse, Miriam, from Waterford in the south east of Ireland. They married and decided to move to the Republic to bring up a family.
While Varadkar has said little of his personal life, it matters little to his party’s members — and even less so to most Irish.
For generations, Ireland was rigidly and traditionally Catholic, with the 1937 constitution that formalised the institutions of the modern Irish state — and which has been largely used as a blueprint by India and other formerly British states for post-colonial governance — recognised the special position of the Roman Catholic church.
That constitutional clause gave the religious hierarchy powers that allowed it to dominate health care services and the provision of education as well as holding moral sway over the populace. Its traditional teachings on marriage, divorce and personal relationships were unassailable, its pastoral care amounted to strict adherence to its moral code of conduct, and its authority over the institutions where vulnerable children were place meant that abuse — sexually and mentally — could fester without fear of legal or other repercussions.
In the late 1970s, following a Supreme Court ruling that allowed women access to contraceptives, the government faced social pressure to legalise the sale of condoms. The move was staunchly opposed by the church hierarchy. The government did relent and “liberalise” the rules, allowing for the sales of condoms if the purchaser was over 18, was married, and possessed a prescription written by a medical doctor. Those who wanted to buy condoms had to find a doctor willing to write a prescription, and then find a pharmacy willing to sell the product. And both doctors’ surgeries and pharmacies that played their part incurred the wrath of conservative protesters. Divorce too had no legal standing and the concept of asset splitting through the courts was alien and not a matter of jurisprudence.
In many ways, the situation then is not dissimilar to the Philippines now, where divorce is illegal and contraception shunned.
The economic boom in Ireland from 1996 onwards allowed for social attitudes to change. That, and the influx of 400,000 foreign nationals to a nation where thousands left each year to join the ranks of an Irish global diaspora, irrevocably changed the social fabric and left the church’s influence fraying.
By 2015, Ireland became the first nation globally to legalise gay marriage by popular referendum, rendering Varadkar’s personal life choices now politically and socially irrelevant.
But he does face huge challenges in taking over the coalition government.
A series of scandals over the treatment of a whistleblower within the ranks of the Irish police — the Garda Siochana — effectively ended the political career of Varadkar’s predecessor, Enda Kenny. The Garda Commissioner has refused to resign, and she is now facing new calls after it was revealed earlier this week that seven men who had sexually abused a child won’t be prosecuted because Garda, who had questioned the young victim, was too heavy handed and did so in an inappropriate manner that has undermined any chance of a criminal indictment.
In March, at the site of a former home run by an order of Roman Catholic nuns for young unwed mothers and their babies between 1926 and 1961, the skeletal remains of more than 700 babies were found in an old septic tank and in other unmarked graves. While there is no suggestion that the victims died from non-natural causes, the manner of the disposal of their bodies is horrific. Kenny described the discovery as “truly appalling” and said the babies were treated as “some kind of sub species”.
Earlier this week, after an intense public outcry, it was decided that a new National Maternity Hospital to be built in Dublin, will be managed by government officials rather than by the Sisters of Charity, another order of nuns that has overseen maternity care at the hospital since the 1840s. It was responsible for running the so-called Magdelene laundries, where unmarried mothers were forced to labour in appalling conditions to atone for their sins.
While Varadkar is being likened to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or new French President Emmanuel Macron for being young, energetic and politically vibrant, his party is wallowing in opinion polls. And with his coalition government relying on an agreement from Fianna Fail, the main opposition party, that it won’t trigger an election for two years, that agreement runs out next spring. It may just be too tempting for Fianna Fail not to topple the government sooner rather than later, throwing the rookie Fine Gael leader into a general election campaign.
It’s not just domestic politics that will test Varadkar. With Brexit talks due to begin on June 19, he faces intense pressure to ensure that the border between the Republic of Ireland in the south with Northern Ireland remains open and without customs or security checks.
With the European Union (EU), promoting the free movement of goods, services and people across its borders, the frontier with Northern Ireland will make it the only land crossing between Britain and the rest of the EU.
That, combined with the peace dividend from the Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of sectarian and political violence in Northern Ireland in 1998, meant the border became little more than a line on a map.
Significantly, though, the Good Friday Agreement also meant that voters in the Republic had to approve two constitutional amendments for the peace process to work: The first meant giving up the Republic’s territorial claim to the entire island of Ireland; the second abolished the recognition of the special position of the Catholic church. In effect, Varadkar’s ascendency was made possible by the passage of both amendments.
