The outline of a post-political life for former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar can now be firmly ascertained.
In the last few months, he has taken up a “mentoring” role at Harvard University, and this was augmented yesterday by a presumably lucrative appointment to the board of global public relations firm “Penta”, which has an Irish connection through it’s 2023 acquisition of Dublin PR firm Hume Brophy. Penta, however, is based in Washington.
Mr. Varadkar will also, in time, be able to call upon generous pensions for his time in public office. Unless he somehow makes terrible decisions with his personal finances, he is likely to live a very comfortable financial life for the rest of his days. A return to full-time medical practice – his job before politics – appears to me to be a highly unlikely prospect.
I write about this not to have a go at Mr. Varadkar, but because of that last point: The Irish state invested considerable sums of money in training him up as a doctor. He then entered politics, and is likely to parlay that political career into a life of comfort that does not involve lengthy shifts in Irish hospitals.
In 2011, the then newly elected Fine Gael Labour Government introduced a reform that prevented politicians from holding on to their previous public sector jobs – but not entirely. A TD or a Senator who is, for example, a teacher, can keep their teaching post open for a period of ten years. Meaning that should they lose an election, they can go right back to their old job.
Politics, in theory, is a vocation: This is the justification for holding jobs open for people when they enter politics. It goes back as far as this country’s time as part of the United Kingdom, and the evolution of political representation: The public used only be represented by the landed aristocracy, and over time it was decided that in order to get ordinary people into politics, they would have to be paid. It was also decided that becoming a public representative should not damage your career outside of politics, and that you should be able to serve the public for a term without fear of a loss of career progression.
But of course it was also decided that TDs should be well-paid and well-compensated, both to attract the best people into politics, and to ward against temptations of corruption. Further, we then decided that they should all have nice pensions, because we wouldn’t like the prospect of a good political leader of our country having to do something embarrassing to fund themselves through their old age. We might complain about political pensions, the theory goes, but it’s better than the indignity of watching Bertie Ahern eating bugs for cash on “I’m a celebrity get me out of here”.
But the world has changed, hasn’t it? Politics has become something that the pay structure was entirely designed to ensure it would never become: A profession.
That is why people like Leo Varadkar don’t need to go back to medicine, or teaching, or engineering or whatever their previous career was. Simply by becoming politicians in the first place, they are opening career opportunities down the line that are shut off to the rest of us. For example, Mr. Varadkar was presumably in medical school with dozens of smart and qualified medical students: Very few of them would ever be considered for a position on the board of a public relations company. Mr. Varadkar has gotten this earnings opportunity because he was Taoiseach, not despite it.
This being a free world, there should be no law preventing Mr. Varadkar from doing any job he wants, or preventing any American company from hiring a former senior politician. But at the same time, given that these earnings opportunities are now open to him, how does it remain morally justified for low-income taxpayers in Ireland to fund a gold-plated pension pot for his retirement? He is double-dipping, surely: Both claiming a pension from them and at the same time profiting (legitimately) from the work that they employed him to do.
Lest this seem like an esoteric point, consider the incentives: Mr. Varadkar left politics at a very young age. He has almost half of his working life ahead of him. In theory (readers may disagree, but hear me out) he had much still to contribute to his life of Irish public service, and he has now given that up in favour of pursuing lucrative opportunities in the private sector that are only available to him because of his half-life of public service.
Thus, a proposal: political pensions should not be automatic entitlements granted to office holders on the basis that they held office. Instead, they should be means-tested, like the other entitlements those same politicians grant to many people in the country. If a politician has accrued income privately that means they are not reliant on their political pension, then there should be no reason to pay one. If a politician genuinely is in penury in old age, then they should be entitled to a pension to support their dignity as an ex-office holder.
This is a basic thing: Politicians profiting from public office – or the perception of it – legitimately and fairly drives many voters to distraction. Means-testing political pensions would both introduce a little fairness to a system that means-tests so many other people, and would also allow Mr. Varadkar and many others to earn as much as they want, privately, without resentment.