Leo Varadkar’s autobiography, ‘Speaking My Mind,’ has hit the shelves less than 18 months since he resigned as Taoiseach.
The speed is striking. Only three months after his shock departure, it was reported that he had already written 100,000 words. Varadkar has pursued other avenues in the same time period, including taking up one role with the global advisory firm Penta and another with Harvard University.
Unlike other retired Taoisigh, he has consciously chosen to remain in the political fray, frequently attracting attention for his interventions on topical issues. The swift publication of an autobiography therefore forms part of an overall trend; he has chosen to be substituted, but yet refuses to walk off the pitch and be just another spectator in the stand.
Varadkar’s life details are widely known and need not be repeated here – indeed, his family background and personal life were often touted as being reasons for voters to support him.
The self-portrait of the young Leo which emerges here is indeed deserving of interest. A bookish young scholar who lacked an interest in sports or relationships, he could have pursued many different paths, and his sharp intellect and prodigious work ethic would likely have led to much success wherever he went.
If Varadkar seems excessively young to be an elder statesman now it is because he was excessively young to be a politician to begin with. One charming anecdote is that when the 20-year-old Leo stood in the local elections, the then Fine Gael party leader John Bruton rang Mr. and Mrs. Varadkar to seek their approval.
Readers will find information about the many issues of state which he was involved in, including Brexit, US-Irish relations, internal Fine Gael squabbles and the various referenda, as well as less savoury aspects of his career including the Garda investigation into his leaking of confidential documents to his friend, Dr. Maitiú Ó Tuathail.
Though he is capable of self-criticism, where this appears, it tends to be focused on individual decisions rather than overall personality traits.
Reviewing the book in The Telegraph, the DCU Professor Gary Murphy points out that the former Taoiseach still “retains a painful lack of self-awareness,” which leads to him identifying defects in other contemporary politicians which he quite obviously suffers from himself.
This has grown painful indeed over the last year, with every op-ed and headline reinforcing the fact that he refuses to step gracefully into the background.
Bringing out a memoir this soon is unwise. In politics, as in sport or other areas, a book authored by an active participant is never likely to be of much value, as the author will never be truly free to comment on his actions and those of his friends.
A period of quiet is needed, the dust must settle, and colleagues must move on before a former politician can properly contribute to the greater understanding of a particular period.
In these circumstances, a memoir can only be a collection of insignificant and self-serving recollections, and that is what ‘Speaking My Mind’ is.
Very occasionally, the author gives away something noteworthy. Varadkar concedes, for example, that his medical training was conducted with an ulterior motive in mind: “I knew that being a doctor – a GP – would help when I eventually stood for election.”
Though effusive in his praise of his Fine Gael and government colleagues, we get brief glimpses of their weaknesses up close.
His close ally Helen McEntee, for instance, appears oddly petulant in not wanting another Fine Gael minister to occupy her ministerial brief while she was on maternity leave, suggesting instead that the Tánaiste take it over – was McEntee worried that her underperformance would be shown up, as it indeed was when others took the reins in the Department of Justice?
When the history of the disastrous Covid lockdown in Ireland is written, Varadkar’s description of how Micheál Martin’s opposition to weakening the NPHET stymied his and Eamon Ryan’s wiser instincts could prove important also.
To the lack of self-awareness is added a lack of self-reflection. Abortion is a major issue in the book and there is a clear sense that Varadkar sees Repeal as one of his greatest achievements.
Yet no clear thought process explaining his oft-commented upon ‘journey’ is contained here. The child of socially liberal parents, Varadkar describes how he and his Trinity College friend Lucinda Creighton worked to liberalise Young Fine Gael’s position on the issue in the early Noughties.
A parallel change in thinking then occurs in the subsequent years, but how and why? While opposing the X Case legislation in 2013, Creighton explained how she became pro-life through learning about the horror of abortion internationally, and how disabled people and others were being systematically targeted in countries where unborn children had no legal protection.
Varadkar’s years as a supposedly committed pro-life advocate are glossed over here. He admits that he knows “that there isn’t a single cut-off point in a pregnancy before which you can truly say ‘this isn’t a human life.’”
Attempting some kind of an explanation, he says that his time as a closeted homosexual made him puritanical: “If I can deny myself what I really want, why the hell can’t you?”
When describing the internal divide on abortion legislation in 2013, he glibly states that “many opposing abortion on moral grounds hadn’t baulked at reducing child benefit or the one-parent family payment.”
But on the basic question of how a politician who publicly opposed ending constitutional protection for the pre-born in 2017 could publicly celebrate the imminent launch of large-scale killing in 2018, there is no answer.
When did Leo Varadkar start to think that executing unborn babies was morally acceptable, and why?
Describing his time as Health Minister, Varadkar writes of the appalling case of Miss Y: the African asylum seeker who became suicidal while pregnant in 2014 and whose son was delivered at twenty-five weeks.
“When I am alone, I often think about him, wonder how he’s getting on, if he is okay, if he is loved,” Varadkar writes.
When Leo Varadkar is alone, does he ever think about another 50,000 children, and what became of them because of his actions? Or even just those who, like the son of Miss Y, came into the world premature and maimed, dying after abortions were unsuccessfully performed?
Soul searching is not Leo’s forte. In the run-up to that 2013 vote, Varadkar’s pitch to Creighton was remarkably amoral: “‘You’re risking losing your seat,’ I warned her. She didn’t want to hear it.”
The Varadkar who authored this book is the Liberal Varadkar who came into being around this time, and it shows, including in his description of being politely told by a voter that she was voting against same-sex ‘marriage’ in 2015: “It felt like a slap in the face.”
The landslide referendum defeats in 2024 were clearly a slap too far, and there is a sense that the author feels the need to defend an indefensible legacy, as when he addresses the Gender Recognition Act which has created so much chaos in its wake.
“I stand by this legislation. The sky hasn’t fallen in and thousands of trans people have had their preferred gender recognised in law,” he limply writes.
Conservative figures, including some who knew him before he held elected office, sometimes ponder what became of the Leo they once knew.
The main answer lies here, but is a politically incorrect one, and was stated by the author even more clearly in an Irish Times interview to promote the book, where he reflected on his famous ‘coming out’ interview with Miriam O’Callaghan.
“The weirdest part was I said this thing about how being gay wasn’t going to define my identity…That was totally wrong,” he now says, before adding that as a newly open homosexual male, he “got a whole new friend group, different types of social life, [and] a partner.”
Many of the unserious controversies which lowered Varadkar in the eyes of the public directly related to his new lifestyle and his relationship with his partner, including the nightclub incident and the social media posts during the coronation of King Charles.
The most serious controversy of all, the criminal investigation into the contract leak, can also be indirectly attributed to his chosen social circle: Maitiú Ó Tuathail knew Varadkar through his boyfriend, as they had both been part of the ‘Gay Doctors Ireland’ group.
So much of Varadkar’s memoirs consists of his impressions of those around him, and these are consequential too, not least due to how often and swiftly his reflections on others get back to his preferred subject in conversation and print.
Remembering his visit to a dying Liam Cosgrave, Varadkar writes that “[a]fterwards, I wondered what he would have made of me.”
Encouraged to sack Simon Harris from cabinet, Varadkar demurs: “He reminds me of myself in many ways. He might well end up being my successor. Sometimes it’s like he’s my little brother.”
The two men are indeed similar and this is probably why Fine Gael’s ‘New Energy’ rebranding in 2024 was never likely to work politically.
Each of them is very good at mastering a briefing paper and speaking to it on television. Varadkar commands greater analytical intelligence, while Harris has more emotional intelligence. They each suffer from an abundance of overweening ambition and both possess no moral core at all.
Both are also on public record criticising President Donald Trump also, who Varadkar charges with having “intelligence without knowledge.”
Of all his criticisms, this is the one that can most readily be turned on back on the author. Diarmaid Ferriter rightly points out that the book “offers little analysis of the health service’s dysfunctions beyond asserting it ‘wasn’t an efficient bureaucracy.’”
This is completely inexcusable. Varadkar has always fancied himself as a policy wonk, and describes working on policy papers for a Fine Gael TD as a college student.
Given this background and his medical training, his description of running the Department of Health should have been a fascinating overview of public policy in Ireland: who the key players were, how the different structures fit together, how Ireland’s health sector compared with its international equivalents and so forth.
Instead, the section dealing with his tenure as Health Minister is sparse on policy, and interspersed with information about his coming out of the closet, how that might impact the decision on gay men donating blood and, of course, his noble journey on abortion.
He seems about as eager to move on from writing about the Department of Health as he was to move on from leading it in 2016, and into a role which would allow for an easier path to becoming Taoiseach.
This book is not a service to history; it is a service to ego, and it would likely have been much worse had Varadkar not had the assistance of a ‘book doctor’ who guided him in rewriting drafts of each chapter.
At 432 pages, the book is much like its creator: a glossy cover, seeming significant at first, but on closer inspection, practically empty within.