Just 20 years ago it would have been inconceivable for the openly gay son of an Indian immigrant to lead the government of Ireland, a conservative, Roman Catholic country. No longer. Having won the Fine Gael leadership yesterday, Leo Varadkar is poised to become Irish prime minister when the country’s parliament returns from recess.
Mr Varadkar entered politics ten years ago, putting on hold a career in medicine. His rapid rise through the party ranks is thanks to his reputation for straight talking in an era of polished political brands, a formidable intellect and a compelling biography. When he became in 2015 the first cabinet minister to come out as gay, months before a referendum on same-sex marriage, he was applauded for helping to bring together the conservatives in his party and younger liberals inspired by his story.
Though a fiscal conservative, Mr Varadkar follows the recently elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, in forswearing old ideological labels of right and left, hoping to build an inclusive coalition. The parallels do not end there. Just as 39-year-old Mr Macron became France’s youngest leader since Napoleon, so 38-year-old Mr Varadkar becomes Ireland’s youngest taoiseach.
It is an exciting moment to take the reins. Ireland’s experience of the global financial crisis was particularly painful, but in recent years its economy has bounced back with vim. Ireland is now on course to be the fastest-growing economy in the eurozone for the fourth year in a row. Risks remain — uncertainty spawned by Brexit and a languid housing market among them — but Ireland’s overall economic outlook is now the envy of the continent.
The Times is delighted to display its own confidence in the republic’s future by launching an Ireland print edition, starting today. It will join our digital version of the paper that has been published since 2015 and will sit alongside the Irish edition of our sister paper, The Sunday Times. Some thought that the rise of digital media would kill print as a medium, but new ventures such as this give lie to such gloomy prophecies. Demand for the unique, tactile pleasure of leafing through a newspaper has proven robust. We warmly invite Mr Varadkar and his compatriots to subscribe.