It’s 2018 and I’m sharing an afternoon drink with a new acquaintance in Southern Ontario, Canada. Conversation turns to changes in Irish society – the familiar narrative about the collapse of Catholic influence and the headlong liberalisation of social values. This rapid transformation can be neatly summarized by two historic referendums: in 1995, Ireland became the second-last European country to legalise divorce (ahead of Malta, which didn’t legalise divorce until 2011), and in 2015 it became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote (and a large majority).

My Canadian drinking companion cuts to the chase: “Your prime minister is gay and Indian, right?” By his tone, I understand that he views this as an intrinsic good – another goal for the good guys. My instinctive response, however, is to tell him that the most popular meme on the Irish left depicts the prime minister in question, Leo Varadkar, with a Margaret Thatcher hairdo. 

As Eoghan Kelly points out in The Conversation, the early years of Varadkar’s leadership, beginning in 2017, were characterised by highly unpopular austerity measures, while in more recent years he has overseen a booming economy, making his resignation this March all the more surprising. Those early years led to Varadkar earning a reputation as the nemesis of the lower classes, especially the unemployed. In 2017, against a backdrop of superficial celebrations of the country’s first openly gay taoiseach, Ireland’s premier satirical website Waterford Whispers News ran with the headline “Leo Varadkar Becomes Ireland’s First Openly Classist Leader”.

In The Guardian, Rory Carroll suggests that even if Varadkar was associated with some historic turning points in Irish politics, especially the 2018 referendum legalising abortion, he was never really seen as an essential player in those developments. “Foreigners tended to swoon over Varadkar as a towering embodiment of a liberalising zeitgeist”, Carroll writes, but “Irish progressives rolled their eyes, saying other politicians and grassroots groups did the heavy lifting.” This dynamic can be seen in early conversations with Varadkar. Interviewed by Niamh Horan in the Irish Independent back in 2016, he is asked if he thinks “abortion in Ireland is a class issue”. Varadkar laughs dismissively and says he doesn’t even understand the question. For context, before abortion became legal, Irish women seeking an abortion would have to pay for travel and abortion services in Britain, which excluded women from lower (or marginalised) socio-economic backgrounds. 

As for Ireland’s subsequent economic fortunes, Eoin Burke-Kennedy in The Irish Times is unsure if Varadkar can really take credit “for full employment, predicated in large part on mass investment from the US, and for a budget surplus driven by record corporate tax receipts from the same firms”. Nevertheless, as Burke-Kennedy argues, this is where Varadkar clearly sees his positive legacy – a legacy which is “a lot like the two-tiered nature of the Irish economy itself, turbocharged in some places, creaking at the seams in others”.

Somewhat less charitably, political scientist Eoin O’Malley claims Varadkar’s “legacy will be that of an electoral loser”, as Jon Henley reports in The Guardian. Indeed, while the reasons behind Varadkar’s resignation may not be entirely clear, one obvious contributing factor is the resounding failure of the family and care referendums in March. The referendums, supported by the government as well as opposition parties, NGOs and civil society organisations, aimed to update the “old-fashioned” definitions of women and the family found in the 1937 Irish constitution, where families are defined by a marriage relationship, and a woman’s value is in her contribution to homemaking. As Shawn Pogatchnik explains in Politico Europe, “those notions from a bygone era contrast starkly with the reality of Ireland today, where two-fifths of children are born out of wedlock and most women work outside the home.”

Those who supported the referendums tend to claim that their failure was due to poor wording, and rushing the vote to coincide with International Women’s Day. Ireland’s small but influential Socialist Party decided to pull their support of the care referendum at the last minute, after listening to the concerns of disability rights advocates. If passed, the referendum could weaken the state’s obligation to provide assistance to the disabled, and give “constitutional expression to the conservative ideological position that the primary responsibility for care resides within the family and family members”, as Irish senator Tom Clonan argued in the Irish Examiner in February. Varadkar’s response to these concerns was hardly reassuring: “I don’t actually think that’s the state’s responsibility, to be honest. I do think that is very much a family responsibility.” As Ciarán O’Rourke says in the left-wing US outlet Jacobin, “Margaret Thatcher would surely have agreed”.  

To those debatable reasons for the failure of these referendums, we should surely add the very real desire to simply say no (twice) to an unpopular government. Where the aforementioned divorce and same-sex marriage referendums tapped into long-boiling resentment of the religious hierarchy – against a grim backdrop of child sexual abuse, mass graves, etc. – the more recent referendums were held at a time when the government itself is the main target of public opprobrium, mainly due to the rampant economic inequality highlighted by Burke-Kennedy and others above.

Up until recently, this malaise might have found a political outlet in Sinn Féin, the former political wing of the IRA. As Agnès Maillot explains in The Conversation, the party has made significant inroads towards gaining respectability and becoming a credible left-wing alternative. But this respectability is a double-edged sword: the closer they get to power (and polls suggest they are very close indeed), the less of a threat they seem to the status quo. This has put the party at odds with their traditional base. As former war correspondent Aris Roussinos writes in UnHerd (in reference to recent polling of voter attitudes by party) “Sinn Feín voters are — to the apparent surprise of its socially liberal leadership — the most nationalist voter bloc in the country”. Thus, without any sense of political representation, a large segment of the population has turned to populist revolt. As Leo Varadkar bids farewell to leadership, Ireland is saying hello to “Europe’s fastest-moving, if inchoate, populist insurgency, to the discomfort of its political class.”

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