Gavan Reilly: Leo thrived in a crisis – but stuttered on his own agenda

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? There are definite parallels between the new Taoiseach, only the 15th ever to hold the job, and the guy he’s replacing. Both have stood out from their first days in Leinster House, in both their energy, their ability to communicate, and their ambition. While neither engineered the vacancy, both were ruthless in filling it.

There’s the old saying about how every quest should have one of two outcomes: either you win, or you learn. Harris was the campaign manager for Simon Coveney back in 2017, and would have learned plenty about how, just as in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Get your TDs lined up, and choreograph their declarations. Waste no time. First movers get the advantage.

Simon Harris subtly acknowledged some of the parallels last Saturday in his debut speech at the Fine Gael ard fheis in Galway. Paying tribute to his predecessor, Harris quoted Leo Varadkar’s own words from that remarkable St Patrick’s Day address in 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “In years to come, they will say of you, when things were at their worst, you were at your best,” Varadkar said then, and Harris said now.

Few would argue against the idea that Leo Varadkar was at his best during a crisis. Whether it was the myriad torturous Brexit impasses, and the need to hold firm against stubborn British exceptionalism, or the onset of the pandemic and the need for firm action in the face of unprecedented fear, Varadkar was a calm and firm actor. Remember: in the general election of February 2020, Fine Gael won 21 per cent of the vote, its lowest ever percentage of the national vote in any general election; by October of that year it was polling at 37 per cent. The only thing that changed in the meantime was the onset of a pandemic and the formation of a government.

But assess Leo Varadkar on his own self-described agenda and the record has a lot less lustre. The speech he gave when returning to the office in December 2022 is interesting to read through the lens of today. Varadkar outlined five national priorities: housing, inflation and the cost of living, energy independence, childhood poverty, and building safer streets.

On the final point the government has already conceded defeat: Leo Varadkar might have insisted the streets were safe, yet Harris acknowledged on Saturday there was a need to ‘make streets safer’. Surely safety is a binary: they are either safe, or they’re not. Similar on housing, where Simon Harris has now raised Fine Gael’s own target (but not the government’s) to 250,000 over the next five years. Energy independence? Little appears to have been done on that front; any progress has certainly been without the Taoiseach’s impetus.

And on childhood poverty? The big gambit from Leo Varadkar v2.0 was to set up a new unit within the Department of the Taoiseach to investigate six areas of specific concern. A year on, we’ve yet to hear of any output from it.

Varadkar did well to deal with the crises that fell at his feet – but when it came to moulding the country in his own mind, his record is chequered at best.