Oisín McKenna

OPINION:

I understand that it seems exciting, the symbolic value of a gay, mixed-race Taoiseach, in a country with an embedded history of institutional homophobia and racism. I understand the validation and pleasure that comes from Ireland finally being seen as progressive and forward thinking, no longer old-fashioned, conservative and theocratic. It feels good to join a liberal, cosmopolitan elite, and for people to see us the way we want to be seen.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how we are seen. It matters how we are. And while Leo Varadkar might seem to symbolise a progressive new Ireland, it doesn’t matter what he symbolises. It matters what he does.

Since entering public life, Varadkar has expressed an impressively varied range of alarmingly right-wing beliefs. This year alone, he expressed a desire to ban public sector strikes and championed an anti-welfare fraud initiative that was not only a thinly veiled hate campaign against social welfare recipients, but was based on inaccurate and misleading figures. In 2016, he made the bizarre and worrying claim that abortion was neither a class nor health issue, and in 2010, he said he does not believe abortion should be available to rape survivors.

Since Fine Gael entered government in 2011, including while Varadkar was Minister for Health, there have been at least four horrific and massively publicised atrocities that occurred as a direct result of the Eighth amendment, and countless more that we do not know about. Still, it has taken until 2017 for government to make even the most tentative, insubstantial gestures towards bringing workable abortion laws to this country.

Varadkar was an instrumental participant in a government that oversaw a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in this state. Despite our new progressive image, this country is more unequal than it ever has been. Ireland is now seeing record levels of homelessness, and in May 2017 there were 2,777 homeless children living here.

This is not an accident. Poverty is a deliberate and avoidable political choice, made by those who believe in protecting the interests of the few, over supporting the welfare of the many. Leo Varadkar has built a career on these political choices and it is irresponsibly naive to believe that Fine Gael believe in any other kind of policy-making.

The progressive Ireland that Leo Varadkar so perfectly symbolises is not a material reality. That progressive Ireland only exists if your vision for progress is a world in which you can get married but your neighbours can’t eat.