Leo Varadkar: Former Prime Minister of Ireland on Power and Letting Go

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. And well, today's guest certainly fits into that category. Leo Varadkar, welcome. Thank you. Doctor, politician, youngest ever Taoiseach. in Ireland, and now memoirist. Yes, writer, yeah. Writer, to add to the list. It's weird for British journalists. I don't know how you find it talking to us, because we don't have the depth of knowledge of Irish politics that perhaps we should have. And yet, we always found ourselves casting our eyes across the sea at moments of crisis.

0:51How do you feel when you come in this direction? yeah i think sometimes irish people are bothered by the fact that we know so much about you and you don't know so much about us um it is of course entirely logical 60 million people in the united kingdom you know five and a half in ireland it's like it's like the canada america thing so we watch your we watch your tv we some often read your papers um listen to radio stations and it doesn't happen in the other direction. But, you know, I suppose it does breed certainly a certain amount of familiarity for me. You know, when I come to Britain, I don't really feel that I'm coming to a foreign country.

1:33I don't even technically need a passport. And of course, like every Irish person, I have loads of friends and family here. And indeed, my parents actually met in England, were it not for the British Empire and the NHS. They would never have met. We would probably not have been able to speak English to each other. During the Brexit negotiations, which was where you kind of excelled yourself, according to most analyses, how significant was British political ignorance of Ireland during those talks? From politicians, not from commentators. well it was to be honest it was politicians media and everyone also at official civil service level as well really um like that was by no means universal sure um but some people yeah well some and a lot um didn't have much of an understanding of ireland or northern ireland and i think that was very apparent uh by the fact that the impact on ireland and northern ireland in particular never really featured at all in the referendum debates um what were you thinking there were one or two exceptions one two exceptions uh teresa may who largely sat the campaign out um made a speech in belfast early doors and then stayed silent that turned out to be that she turned out to be quite prophetic in terms of the impact that it could have on on northern ireland and the uh the uh the delicate delicate piece there was it frustrating i i not not so much when you sat down to do the negotiations but but knowing what extraordinary impact this would have on the island of ireland and also knowing that none of the people engaged in the debate on either side really seem to either appreciate it or care it was a bit um you know ultimately uh the decision to leave the european union was a decision made by the british people for britain um and that was just stark reality of it uh and the impact on ireland wasn't the only thing that wasn't really thought through, unfortunately.

3:37Even the extent to which what it would really mean to be outside the single market. And there were people advocating Brexit who were promising that trade would remain seamless and that Britain could stay in the single market. So it was a little bit frustrating in that sense. But I also, I know my history and it's not necessarily something that's particularly new. That blasé approach to the island. Well, just a lack of awareness of Ireland as politics, even where the border is. Yes. I remember an interesting kind of vox pop. And you should be careful of vox pops because they can be taken out of context and twisted.

4:19But just asking people in Britain to point out where the border is. And as you know, as somebody who visits Ireland, the most northerly tip of Ireland is not in Northern Ireland. I remember a call from a fellow who'd had a bit of building work done since the Good Friday Agreement had been signed. And it meant that his bathroom was in the south and the rest of his house was still in the north. And you sort of thought, how exactly are you going to reintroduce regulatory? It goes through villages, through farms, through houses. It's an artificial border. It's not even the provincial border of Ulster.

4:52It's an artificial border that was drawn in 1921 when people believed it would be temporary and would be changed by a boundary commission, and that didn't happen. We mentioned Leicester. That's where your parents met, but it's not where you were born. Your mother had made her way there from County Waterford, and your dad, Ashok, had made his way there from India. Yes. So, I mean, you have migration and diversity built into not just your DNA, but also your family tree. Yeah, that's true. So he's a doctor, she's a nurse. They both migrated to England in the 70s. met in Leicester got married in Maidenhead in the Catholic parish church in Tredamay's constituency which we've had about once or twice lived here for a long time my sister was born in England is still here in fact well she came back to Ireland in the meantime obviously they tried living in India for about six months didn't really work out they have differing accounts as to why that was and then came to live in Ireland and they'd moved back to Ireland many years before I was born.

6:07But like a lot of things, your background does form your politics. And it's something I hadn't really thought about very much until I met with President Obama. This was during Trump's first term. Obama was no longer president at that stage. And he grew up in Kansas, in a very white state, raised by white grandparents. And he kind of said to me that you and I have to believe some of the things we believe about the world and about politics by virtue of our birth we were the two tall dark kids with funny names and i never thought about that until he said it and and you know you know of course my heritage and my upbringing must have made me more globally focused outward looking always knew that there was a world way beyond ireland uh and part of the reasons as to why um i believe in things like multilateralism um why i skew nationalism um must in some ways be linked to my heritage because if you take those philosophies to an extreme somebody like me shouldn't exist gosh yes or interracial marriages were i don't think they were ever illegal in ireland or the uk they probably just weren't contemplated but they certainly were in places like the United States.

7:26Even in 1971, it must have been head-turning for your parents to be together in public, certainly to get married. It would be a very rare experience. Yeah. Even more so in Ireland than here. Yes. And my mum had to get special permission from the Catholic Church, in theory from the Pope, but I doubt the Pope was dealing with these things himself. Print the legend. I'm sure it was from a bishop's secretary somewhere or something. And that was the era of what they called Nae to Marry. So part of the agreement was that my mum could marry my dad, who's Hindu, but the kids would have to be brought up Catholic.

8:07And indeed we were. You needed papal dispensation just to marry someone from outside the faith. You did at that time, yeah. Good Lord. Because I know until quite recently it would be tricky for divorced people to marry in a Catholic church. But I didn't know that. my parents I think my mum must have just passed herself off as a Catholic when I got adopted they got an awful lot of trouble from some of the nuns who just wouldn't contemplate giving a baby to a non-Catholic family yeah my dad was obviously Catholic but my mum wasn't um was it a great romance do your parents did they talk to you do they talk to you about it much I mean because it must have been a big love match mustn't it their eyes met across an operating table or yeah I guess So they haven't told us all that much about it.

8:50And there's a big enough age gap between them. I think it's about eight years. Which I think is big when you're young. As you get older, eight years isn't so much. But I mean, the idea of going the distance, that actually getting married as opposed to just courting must have had ramifications that are quite hard to contemplate in 2025. Yeah, like they must have been very brave in a lot of ways. uh because at that that time the world world was different yeah um so it must have been a very very brave thing and of course um my parents uh my grandparents in ireland were uh very accepting of it as well were they yeah um and then you're in ireland so you're born in 1979 your dad is established by then as a as a doctor in in in ireland did your mom work when you were young or did she knock it on the head when she was raising you and your sisters?

9:46First couple of years, she was a stay-at-home mom. So that was great in a lot of ways. I still have vague memories of hanging out with my mom when I was three or four and collecting the child benefit and going for lunch and being walked to my preschool. But when my dad became a GP, he set up practice. And the GP system in Ireland is very similar to Britain. they're you know sort of self-employed people run their own practices journey own their own practices she then became the practice nurse accountant manager receptionist and really everything so you know they spent an awful lot of time together if you think about it because the the um the surgery was initially in the house and then later we moved to bigger house and was in the extension to that house so there was never really a clear definition between work and home no and you don't know i mean often on full disclosure we have to acknowledge that you only have your own childhood you don't have any other childhoods to compare it to so you wouldn't know that that was slightly out of the ordinary or it was a bit a bit a bit a bit different a tight-knit family though i sense a very tight-knit family no no sense yet of it being kind of you against the world the varadkas against the world or anything like that no definitely um uh notwithstanding uh our biracial background um my parents were keen for us to fit in You know, words like diversity weren't really used to refer to people anyway in those days.

11:17And I suppose it made sense in 1980s Ireland to raise us very much in the culture of the time. In the culture of the country. So it wasn't, I mean, what were the signs of Hinduism in the family home? Very few. Indian food definitely was a feature, but that's not necessary. That definitely was a plus. and my mum did learn how to cook Indian food. She did the Madhuri Jaffrey cooking courses. So food is one thing. Cricket, which, again, is not a huge sport in Ireland, but has a following. It's improved in the course of your lifetime, hasn't it? It's become a much bigger deal. We've been in the World Cup and have done pretty well.

11:59But your dad loved cricket. Yeah, it's almost a religion in the subcontinent, as you know. and then the third thing the odd kind of Hindu religious festival would sort of creep in so Diwali obviously would have been aware of as a kid and then Gumpati which is the Marathi word for the elephant god Ganesh there's idols in the house as well as crosses hedging your bets then in a spiritual sense as a family I still do actually ironically on my on my mantelpiece at home there's there's a yeah there's across there's a menorah there's a um a gumpety a ganache um it's also a skeksi and lots of other things when so the words might not have existed or certainly they weren't in common parlance but when did little leo become conscious of being biracial of being a little bit different from from his classmates or his i think i think i always was yeah um and uh you know you can't not be if you're the only person of color in a class of 30 kids um would people comment on it would kids be curious or i don't know about kids but you do get this sort of unconscious bias where people treat you a little bit differently um which i really didn't like but i kind of but you'd spot it yeah yeah you know you'd get funny things like like how often do you how often do you go back to india or do you go back to india much like i'm not from india you know i don't go back there and because it was so expensive to go there i was 14 before i ever got to go there um so there's those kind of little things uh or people would assume other kids would assume that i would have a higher level of heat tolerance but um and like none of those things none of those things are are racist by any means because they're not malicious in intent but but they are they are a little bit uh a little bit othering And what did you like apart from cricket and curry?

13:59What were the sort of things that you thrived at at school? Were you a good student at primary school? Did you read a lot? Yeah, definitely kind of a swatty student of everything. Didn't really get into sports, but did like to study. I would have been ahead in the textbooks as to where we were in class, would have kind of read ahead, things like that, wanted to do well in quizzes and exams and so on. and then also my family on both sides would value education uh certainly on my mum's side um uh would have valued education but then my dad again coming from an indian asian background would always have encouraged us and pushed us to uh uh be uh be top of the class and probably to follow him into medicine was that a kind of yeah a bit like i i like looking back now i felt a bit of unconscious pressure to go into medicine it was the family business um my dad had a moment built up a very successful practice with a lot of patients um they never pushed me into it you know that's something i i felt i'm not sure it was ever true um but as it happened both my sister two sisters one's a doctor one's one's a midwife and me as a doctor and none of us none of us inherited the practice so you took over the gp which um in a weird way i feel a little bit bad about because my folks invested into that for 20 30 years family business as well as as well as a gp surgery and um you know weren't able to kind of pass it on or sell it on really you were never tempted didn't want to go down no like it did cross my mind i trained as a gp so it would have been an option not sure whether whether i would have been able to work with my dad um day and night though that could have been tricky um although he probably would have retired in that scenario but as it happened that never really arose because i got elected to the dahl the irish parliament um while i was still finishing off my gp training and perhaps if i hadn't been i might have taken over the practice but so when did when did that fork in the road appear then because family legend has it that you were seven when you announced that you wanted to be a future minister for health so you knew what politics was yeah and you were conscious of it's an odd parallel to draw on this side of the sea because we're not really holding our politicians in very high regard at the moment but i've often thought that politics is in a way medicine for countries as opposed to individuals and that the impulse can actually be quite similar yeah our showbiz for ugly people well i don't that's a less flattering analysis isn't it or analogy so i mean it's a young age at which to be politically conscious let alone yeah politically ambitious and the book starts with that it starts with me um going down to the polling station to vote my mum in what i think was the 1987 election and being very excited by the whole process why do you think that was i'm not sure i'm not sure like why do why do kids get into anything yeah um i'm not sure uh well i can probably answer that actually i mean you know you get into football because it's great fun and the the crowds are roaring and you imagine it happening to you one day casting a vote in a bite in an election i don't know that that it is quite as easy to work out what's exciting about that did you have a sense that's obvious yeah did you have a sense of um importance that this was perhaps your parents imbued you with an idea of your democratic rights being really powerful i definitely knew was important um and the politics and democracy was a means by which you could change things would this be dinner table conversation i think so um like we definitely talked about the news and politics at the dinner table um in a way that i'd say most households didn't and then um because we eat late because surgery would go on late okay I then often watch the news of my parents and would be allowed to stay up late sometimes to watch current affairs programs and so on.

18:01And I definitely liked talking to adults, like being able to have adult conversations. What was Ireland like at the time? It's easy to overlook just how far and how fast the country has moved. And again, you know, pretty much in the course of your lifetime. Yeah, so quite a different place to what it is now. much more homogenous. Up until the mid-90s, we had the Troubles in Northern Ireland, so we were always aware of the violence. It didn't really affect us in Dublin, but any time you turned on the radio or the TV, you'd hear about a shooting or a bombing in Belfast for the Troubles. We're there in Northern Ireland, and what was happening there was always in the background.

18:41Economically also, not a successful country, so people emigrated and never came back. It's not like emigration now, where as many people, as many Irish citizens who leave every year come back. It's a different type of thing than it was then. And I remember, you know, kids in my class, families packing up and going to Canada, America or Britain and they'd never be seen again. Gosh. So economically it was a very different place and that all started to change really around the mid-1990s where the economy took off and we had the whole phenomenon of returning immigrants you know people who were coming back from the UK and America and abroad and Australia and also bringing with them I think different ideas and different social attitudes.

19:26So where did political consciousness kick in what were you thinking were the things that you could improve or what were the things that you cared about in that kind of context? Certainly when I went for election the first time as a councillor it would have been How old were you then? 20 years old That's incredible Didn't get elected Learned more from the election I lost than all the ones subsequently which I won and that's true in life I think you learn more from your mistakes and your failures than you do from your successes At the time in that election I had a very local focus because the area that I lived in was rapidly developing um huge numbers of new housing developments but no real infrastructure um schools and prefabs poor public transport as i said in that campaign more golf courses than playgrounds i was very keen to change that but i was never really a localist uh definitely had that kind of um wider view about what was happening in the world and how that might be changed and i mean it's intriguing isn't it at such a young age to have a desire to get your hands on the levers of power and the levers of change but i'd like to know a little bit more about what changes young leo wanted to enact or see around him but was it very localized was it just yeah no like i i'm trying to think about i'm trying to think about what that was now it's it's a great great great question so what was i think you know i said there were different periods of my life teenager 20s you So there would have been different things and different causes at different times.

21:08One of the things we would have had during that period is a number of referendums around our relationship with Europe because we had referendums on Maastricht and Lisbon and Amsterdam and Nice, and I was very much in favor of Ireland being at the heart of Europe, like the idea of a single currency, of a European citizenship, of being able to live, work, travel, do business freely from Athens to Reykjavik. So I like that idea and still do. So definitely that sense of things. Would have remembered the Iraq war happening. Probably would have been in, I think I was in, no, that was a bit later now.

21:50So it would depend at different points and different times. So, I mean, your politics was pragmatic then. You're not a sort of young ideologue or a young idealist even. your approach even then would have been, I think I'd be quite good at this and I think I would be able to do good things. I don't think it was managerial. No. Like, I usually sort of describe my politics being around three ideas, essentially, and this hasn't changed very much. You know, one is that Ireland should be at the heart of Europe, at the centre of the world, engaged in the UN with a good international development budget, all of those types of things peacekeeping um well let's pick them off hang on where do you think that came from what what is there in in the early years that formed that because again it's it's not an obvious yeah intellectual destination to arrive i think that would have had a lot to do my upbringing the fact that um i had a dad from india always knew that the world was a bigger place beyond ireland um that both my parents had lived abroad and would often talk about um their time in in the uk and england which was a very good one um and we also would have uh watched you know tv programs from all over the world so that was definitely definitely part of it never had this kind of idea that it would be a great thing if we could cut ourselves off um you know never had that thought or our feeling it's a cometh the hour cometh the man in a way isn't it because your experience was quite zeitgeisty you know your family were not you know your roots your i mean on your mom's side your irish roots were very deep but she'd moved overseas the the unit of your mom and your dad and you and your two sisters very 21st century island in a way that sense of possibility and and scale the the role that island could play on a much bigger global stage i wonder if you needed your kind of background to see it like that yeah that i don't know but i i think i think i think i did kind of capture the zeitgeist at least for a period of a period period of time and that was that was largely accidental so it always is isn't it you know right place right time um principle two so so this this sort of island's role on the global stage and this absurd passion and some parts of politics for isolationism as the anathema to you what's the second one so i think the second thing is um i suppose a lot of people would call a writer center economic view um you should try and balance the books you should try and support business before you distribute wealth and you should distribute it before you before you distribute wealth you actually have to create it um just naturally thinking that ideas like free trade uh were a good idea and that probably again links to background um how conscious were you of the business side of your dad's practice yeah like very aware that it was a business as well as um as well as a uh a social service and a medical service that everything had to be paid for that the money um had to come in and then you know my grandparents my Irish grandparents who I knew my Indian grandparents died for as born they were farmers again uh it's food production but it's also it's also a business and my grandfather had been had a haulage business and an oil distribution business i think that whole idea of you know self-employed self-reliance um having to work to create wealth this is where the irish son of thatcher subricade it probably did yeah which um which i don't don't think is accurate um i understand where it comes from because because of some remarks i made along the way that maybe a little heartless um like what um i don't know no um well yeah i said what one thing when i was minister social protection is much later on uh i ran a campaign against um against welfare fraud yeah and some people characterize that as being that's right as being Tory that i was trying to crack down on on poor people um as it happens uh it's not poor people who commit welfare fraud because they're entitled to welfare it's people who are trying to claim it um when they're not entitled and very often in ireland it's people who are what we call working and claiming so they're working the black economy not paying their taxes and also claiming welfare so it's a double dodge in many ways um quite a lazy criticism then really it it is but um but for people who wanted to make that criticism it was um it was ammunition and as it happened i was able to recycle the savings uh into other social protection programs.

26:31And one of those, in fact, was extending the safety net to people who are self-employed. There's one thing I really found in the crash in Ireland had a property bubble, a financial crash. I remember knocking on doors and talking to people. And very often, the man in the house, if you like, or the main earner in the house was working construction or was an architect, was linked to the property industry in some way. and the second income of the house, usually the woman might have been a nurse who was working part-time, a primary teacher, maybe a care worker, somebody who was bringing in less income.

27:06But they were entitled to nothing because they then got means tested against their wife's income. And that was very unfair. That's one of the things that I changed was to give people who are self-employed a proper safety net in return for the contributions that they make. These are big things, even though they are, well, I suppose lots and lots of little things. adding up to it to a big thing hard to i mean it's a hard political platform to sell it's not sexy it's not it's not exciting but it's the stuff that matters to you because you you did similar things in the pension arena as well that's right yeah yes i brought in and the first first payments will start in january but uh a similar system to have here on enrollment a universal pension system we have a decent enough state but these are big things they are yeah and the other thing which is still underway and the new government is slowing it down but hopefully we'll finish the job which is the living wage which is to make sure that any working person that we link our living wage to 60 % of median earnings so that anybody who works gets a decent bare minimum and that it rises with wages and with salaries and that that was to be finished by 26 looks now like we finished by 29 but the way I would have sold that would have been around making work pay yes um that that sort of language um one thing i would have used is the whole language around wanting to help people who get up early in the morning which to me is people who work who contribute um of course that was used against me some people said i was against night workers which wasn't the point at all obviously and another said it was you know a dog whistle that was sort of trying to um you know dump on people who couldn't work you know but that was not it at all uh yeah it's a it's a minefield that's and yet you know we think of a of of minimum wage or living wage legislation as leaning leftwards yeah and support for business and as leaning rightwards you don't you're not easily categorized then and you know yeah probably not probably not um but you know that whole left right linear spectrum thing you know for people who are interested in politics and i i know your listeners are they wouldn't be listening to this I think we all know that's ridiculously simplistic.

29:19Yeah, increasingly so. More than ever. It's probably a 3D thing. Yeah. Somebody needs to find this cube and try and put us into it.

29:29So when you felt these stirrings, these political stirrings, there was never any doubt about which party you would join? There was a bit. Was there? I did toy with joining a much smaller party. No longer exists. probably the right decision called the progressive democrats and they were also a centre right party but would have been more liberal and social issues more urban also maybe a little bit more dynamic and had some really impressive leaders people like Mary Harney who became our deputy prime minister and would be somebody who I would have relied on for informal advice down the years but But yeah, went for the bigger party in the end.

30:17At Trinity, I think you joined the youth wing. I joined in Trinity. That's when I got involved for real. Right. But I technically would have been a paper member of my local branch in Blanchetown. The Dr. Mark Cooney branch when I was 16. But I didn't really go to meetings and things. So if I'd met you, I mean, you did law for a couple of weeks at university before you switched to medicine. How did that happen? um got got an upgrade on rechecks was it yeah so you wanted to do medicine i did but when i look back on my choices um our system is different to um yes the system here my my nephew here in london is about to start in durham soon so i know how your system works with the matching and so on ours is very different you do you essentially rank the courses you want to do and i kind of had a mix of medicine and law courses which doesn't make any sense at all to me now but I think I was thinking I wanted to stay in Dublin and definitely wanted to go to Trinity College, which is where I went.

31:14But looking back now, not sure how logical those course choices were. But like, do you really know at 18 what you want to do? Or should you know at 18 what you want to do? Well, you knew you wanted to be in politics. Yeah, so I was more certain about that than I was about which sort of real job I'd have. Okay, so that, I mean, if I'd met you then... Although I never considered studying politics. Did you not? I know people do. No need to, really. yeah political science is a very different thing to the practicalities of politics so if i'd met you in your first year at trinity and said what are you going to do when you grow up you just said i'm going to be a politician it's a good chance if i if i if i trust you and didn't think you might laugh at me yeah i might have uh yeah i might have might have told you that and certainly all my friends and you know peer group would have known that that's that was the plan where i was heading and wanted to do and got very involved in politics uh in in college and university um um what was the approach to your studies then because it's medicine's no cakewalk is it it's an incredibly hard work and yet in the back of your mind there must be part of you wondering if you were going to be doing it for very long if the political ambitions were realized the medicine would drop by the wayside quite quickly well kind of bad really i you know i neglected my studies when i was in university um would have always liked to have been and was close to top of the class in school and um obviously got the marks to get into medicine uh but was not a great student would have missed a lot of lectures um the year i ran for election and didn't win which was 1999 i i think i failed all my exams oh really thankfully i was able to recover them got 380 votes was that yeah it was that bad yeah well i don't know i mean it was a local election but how much the winner got so it's all relative isn't it like i came in sixth in what was a four seat district.

33:01It could have been worse. That was bad. I'm interested in this. I'm interested in the... You weren't paying lip service to medicine because you did qualify. And yet, you knew it wasn't what you wanted to do. You didn't want to be doing it 30, 40 years hence like your dad was. Was it a safety net? I think a little bit, yeah. One thing my mum was very concerned about was that I would drop out of university and end up working in politics or going to politics full time um and um she was keen and i probably was keen too to make sure that i had i feel like a real job and some real life experience um so maybe that sounds a bit calculating but it's also it's also kind of sensible to you it's also good son yeah it's also good son behavior isn't it because it was yeah care for you and they want they want and And then also as well, and I think it was an advantage when I was in elected politics, I never really had financial worries about losing my seat.

34:06Like I know there are people who would genuinely worry that if they lost their seat, you know, how would they pay the bills? Gosh, we forget that. That's something I didn't particularly have to worry about. Because you had an ology, as they say. You had something to fall back on. And I know, I think in the UK, it's not unusual for very wealthy people to be elected to Parliament. That isn't unusual in Ireland. It tends to just be regular people. So you need the income. You need the wage. And the political side of things, while the academic side of things were for the first time in your life not flourishing, the political side of things flourished.

34:41It's starting to take off, yeah. Yeah, really, really quite quickly. You're president of the Youth of the European People's Party. You're hopping around Europe debating with other activists. That was fun. That must have been. Got to see Europe and larger at somebody else's expense. And then in 2000, you're in the US House of Representatives, I think. Yeah, that was an internship, yeah, the Washington-Ireland program. That was a lot of fun. So none of this is knocking the gloss off your view of politics. All of this is hardening your results. No, I was liking it more and more, you know, being in the European Parliament, being in D.C.

35:17Yeah, definitely, definitely. So you graduate three years later. um i mean the easy thing is lab coat by day and then you're put politicking by night yeah yeah and that was that was you that was your well there was a period where i was trying to do both and uh you know to be a doctor as well as being uh a local councillor and a candidate for parliament and that was extremely difficult um and you know i felt i was doing a half-hour job of both and i down my colleagues particularly my medical colleagues uh so you know got to the point where i had to kind of go part-time and start to take leave of absence and so on um and i don't want to skip over the period i don't know how long you were there for but you did another internship at your father's old hospital in in mumbai that was yeah that was very short that was a kind of student placement yeah a couple weeks but it was the first time i kind of got to know india properly though yes because any time I'd been previously it was uh you know a family holiday um I sort of lived on my own for a few weeks in Mumbai and got to know the place and got to see got to see a lot of the good things um I'm trying to think back and obviously I grew up here and I'm seven years older than you but were there moments where as you sort of as your sexuality became clear which which, I mean, is from day one, really.

36:40Did you ever worry that that would be an obstacle to political success in that era in that country? No, I guess I did. Before you come out publicly, and I think these days you don't even have to come out, but in those days you did. You have to kind of come out to yourself, and that took me a long time, but I definitely was worried, probably needlessly so. Most of my worries were in my own head rather than anywhere else. But I would have been worried, yeah, that this could potentially be a negative. And bear in mind, I grew up in Ireland in which homosexual relations were criminalized up until 1993.

37:19So I was doing the equivalent of my GCSEs around the time that ban was lifted. So the chilling effect of that, I think, was still there five, ten years later. um and when you i mean people have written a lot about this and you cover it in the book but modestly i suppose um a biographer might have been less modest about the speed of your success and the speed with which you um began to just win stuff yeah like i'm not sure like it wasn't in some ways it wasn't all that fast was it not it looks fast and then it just became fast yes yeah So by the 2004 elections, you're topping the national poll.

38:03Explain to British listeners what that means. So it was our local elections that year, and we have all our local elections on the same day, once every five years, and that was the highest vote in the country. It was enough votes to get elected to Parliament or not far off. So I think that kind of put me on the map. Why do you think that was? No modesty allowed. What were you doing differently from others, or what were you doing better? um uh ran a great campaign for a start which was which was a positive um this time i was running in the area i was from and i think uh coming from a well-known family my dad being local gp was a big plus in that election when it came to opening doors um i was also the only candidate we have a very different electoral system to the uk we have a proportional system um so had there been two candidates from my party that vote would have been lower that's that's that's just a mathematical fact because i would have had to split that vote um but i think i think really kind of showed that i had worked hard when after i was co-opted the council before i was elected and then um and then uh really ran um a very different kind of modern campaign and and then you're on the path to parliament but then you mean it now begins to feel almost inevitable doesn't it that you're gonna be going down that i think it was at that point yeah uh and And a lot of things did kind of fall right for me at the right time.

39:27You know, planets aligning. So a lot of people get elected to the local council, but it takes a long time for them to then get elected to parliament. Mine was only a three-year gap, and that was partially because we had had a very bad election five years previously and had almost been wiped out in the Dublin area. And the party had gaps and needed candidates. and here was this guy who did really well in the local elections and wants to do it and I became the candidate. So a lot of serendipity, including your name probably. It's quite memorable, isn't it? People are going to remember your name, both your Christian name and your surname.

40:04Yeah, that's right. And we use both. There are lots of posters just said Leo. Yes, I'm sure. And Leo for Taoiseach starts getting chanted when you win your first one, when you get in at the age of 28. Generally speaking, bottom of the ballot paper as well, which can be a help. Yes, of course it does. Unless there's a walsh running or something. And we mentioned sexuality, ethnicity, ever something that you thought might hold you back? I mean, again, it's that serendipity and zeitgeist. Those are the two words that sort of in some ways sum up everything we've discussed so far is that the world was changing and you were both a beneficiary and a symbol of that change.

40:37The world of Ireland was changing and then the sort of serendipity of being wanting it and being well placed to get it at that precise moment in time. Yeah, I wasn't always that lucky. No, of course not. But it was probably the first time in Irish history when having a foreign name and having a darker skin would not hold you back. We, of course, had de Valera. Yes. But that's a slightly different story. Yes. So you knew that you were kind of nothing, there were no obstacles to the biggest jobs. They were potential obstacles, but I never saw them as insurmountable. um and also i decided you know the foreign name the race issue would just be an incidental i didn't try to try to kind of use it either no that's interesting that was a conscious decision because you talked when you first got elected of your dad traveling 5 000 miles but that's that's a story isn't it that's not an identity yes and it's a story a lot of irish people would of course yeah would understand recognize it albeit that they traveled away from i don't know their family members that traveled away from Ireland.

41:43But also it was in the context of the fact that I was born and raised in Ireland and my parents might have stayed in England in which case I would have been born and raised here. They had talked about going to the United States. They tried India for a while. There are four countries in which I could have been born. And I was born in Ireland and I think I won the lottery in that one because it's such a great country.

42:11so four years after you get into parliament the crash occurs this is this is hard sticky politics now and and also then you are uh is embroiled the right word it's one of those words that only ever appears in newspaper articles but you're you're involved in the attempts to um to to get rid of end of kenny you side very much with richard bruton um and yet none of this stuck you didn't garner a reputation for disloyalty you didn't and you didn't stay alienated from some of the politicians that you'd moved against um no and and to be frank it was disloyal yes uh you know we had a party leader um we'd run a bad opinion polls and uh overreacted to that and i was one of a group of MPs who decided we should have a change of leader.

43:04And ultimately we were unsuccessful. And I was lucky again, I think, that he decided that he would be more forgiving towards the newer, younger MPs who went against him than the ones that he had known for years or perhaps, you know, would even have known that there was the time Fine Gael families, you know people who uh whose dad or granddad had been an mp as well that's kind of faded over time were you in too much of a hurry at that point do you think or not yeah i was definitely in a hurry whether it was too much or not i don't know because opportunities arise when they do not necessarily when they suit um and he recognized your facility with media you became now very much yeah you know in any party um there's whatever 10 15 20 spokespeople uh the public will only ever be familiar with a small number of them um and i was determined that i should be one of them that i'd be a household name so i was out there in the media anytime i was given the opportunity um would very rarely turn down the opportunity to go into studio or represent the party in a debate um and then was edgier perhaps than other people might have been more strident in criticism um you know in part everything everything i said i believed but sure are almost everything um but um definitely wanted to uh be noticed and to develop a reputation and develop a name you said you were angry i mean it's a figure of speech angry young man you've applied it to yourself a couple of times in the past what were you angry about yeah i got lost i got a lot less angry as the years went by probably because I was in government and became responsible for the problems that the country had.

44:57But at the time we were in opposition, there'd been a financial crash. The economy was on the floor. People like me who still had jobs or were in negative equity or property values had collapsed. Huge numbers of other people, many of whom I knew lost their jobs and couldn't pay their mortgages or had to emigrate at that time. And then the IMF arrived to you know take over our affairs so for the first time since independence um we were dependent on the kindness of strangers as somebody else described it and i was angry about that i have to say angry angry that ever happened and angry that the people who were at least in part responsible for it were still in government and wanted to get them out this offends your irishness offends your patriotic pride yeah like it was um you know it was it was humiliating that uh um it wasn't all our fault by any means there are major international factors at play here but uh the country had borrowed too much um spent too much um and ultimately had to rely on the imf and the european central bank and the european commission for a line of credit you you are now who then got to determine uh how the country was governed yeah until until we got rid of them in 2014 and that sticks in the crawl i mean well we need to make sure it never never ever happens again so you you've become a household name uh when did you i mean i know that you reputedly wrote it in a childhood diary but were you always thinking that perhaps the top job could be yours one day in quiet moments yeah like i definitely thought that i would get into politics that i would get elected i didn't necessarily know where i would end up um you know would have hoped that it would be a cabinet position and maybe the top job at the end of the day i also had thoughts about becoming an MEP you know I like the European aspect of politics and that potentially might have been a different route but that never opened up you still could I don't think so yeah legally I could yeah but that's a whole other question um and and you are a politician who who does stuff aren't you you're not not a politician who who sits waiting for opportunities or keeps his head below the parapet or stays out of it um one one account describes you as having become gaff prone when when we're looking back in 2011 when you suggested there might be the need for another bailout but also the things you attach yourselves to are big things so you've mentioned the welfare thing welfare cheats cheaters all um that was when you were minister for social protection and you took a lot of jip for that but taxpayers probably felt that you were on their side that it would yeah i hope so and i was and i know but i think um i think there's kind of two sides to that coin i was definitely willing to uh speak out yes um to be outspoken and to be unpopular um in a moment yeah and to be unpopular and not and just to say things that people um that people didn't necessarily want to hear and that got me noticed but then at the same time there were times when I was shot my mouth off quite frankly Are you embarrassed of the clack?