You asked for it Leo.
Leo Varadkar called time on his leadership as Taoiseach and Fine Gael president on Wednesday afternoon, much to the shock of, well, everyone.
While the timing of the announcement sure was a surprise, we shouldn’t be so surprised that it has come to this, and his farewell speech to the nation had some glaring omissions.
The Taoiseach did as all politicians worth their salt would do at the drop of a hat – listed everything he was proud of to have achieved during his time in power.
“Of course,” he added, “there are other areas in which we have been much less successful and some in which we have gone backwards, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I leave it to others to point them out on a day like this. They will receive plenty of airtime and column space”.
Well, Leo, you asked for it. And we here at JOE would like to give you the send off you really deserve.
The glaring issue Leo Varadkar deliberately didn’t address in his speech
The thing is, Taoiseachs don’t resign for the hell of it. Something has to have gone wrong. Listening to Varadkar’s speech, however, you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
His vague “political and personal, but mostly political” reasons for stepping down are, of course, an ambiguous smokescreen for the failures of the current government that he is still leading, up until Fine Gael find their replacement.
Most recently, of course, we can look to the utter shambles that was this month’s referendums, to which the Irish public overwhelmingly rejected after a period of confusion, anger and bafflement, while the government threw out pseudo-progressive rhetoric for a Yes/Yes vote.
These were thrown out in the hope that nobody would actually question the language behind the amendments, which had disability rights activists and carers alike in uproar, and rightly so.
The Taoiseach then admitted that the government had “failed” to convince the public in their Yes/Yes campaign, describing it as suffering “two wallops”.
In reality, that’s grounds for a resignation in and of itself. But that was just this month’s failing.
Over Leo’s on-again-off-again leadership of the country, there has been plenty more failings that we’re happy to list, but we’re going to focus on the most glaring of all – the record homelessness crisis we’re currently experiencing.
Homeless numbers have grown exponentially under the current government’s watch, with the most recent figures of those accessing emergency accommodation currently standing at 13,531.
4,000 of those people are children.
While we won’t know the true extent of the harm the homelessness crisis has done in Ireland until the next generation grows up, it’s a sure thing that it will leave an incredibly damaging legacy on Ireland for decades to come.
In January last year, homelessness figures stood at 11,500, to which the Taoiseach commented saying that not all of them were living “on the streets” or “in tents”, a comment so tone-deaf it’s almost hard to fathom for a leader overseeing such a crisis.
Varadkar also claimed that many people living in emergency accommodation provided by the government have turned down an offer of a home.
Dublin Simon Community CEO Catherine Kenny refuted his comments, saying that it was “certainly not my experience”.
It’s also worth mentioning that as a direct result of the housing crisis the current government is overseeing, thousands of people of a certain generation will have watched Varadkar’s speech from the sitting room of their parents’ house, abroad in Canada or Australia, or under the roof of their landlord’s spare room.
Standing in front of the media outside governement buildings today, Mr Varadkar said that his government has “led the country through an inflation and cost of living crisis, the worst of which is now thankfully behind us.”
The truth is that this isn’t behind us. This isn’t a drawing of the line, nor is it a sweeping under the carpet. That isn’t the send off the Taoiseach deserves.
Leo Varadkar’s resignation is as clear a message as ever: his government has failed us.
Images via Rolling News.
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