Former Irish Ambassador DANIEL MULHALL reviews Leo Varadkar’s autobiography
FULL disclosure.
Leo Varadkar’s years atop the Irish political ladder coincided with the latter stages of my 44-year professional career with the Department of Foreign Affairs and I hosted him as Minister and Taoiseach during my time as Ambassador in Berlin, London and Washington.
I accompanied him to his first British-Irish summit (with Theresa May) at Downing Street in 2017 and to his first meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office for St. Patrick’s Day 2018.
Leo and Donald were hardly kindred spirits but they got on fine. Later, when I met Trump at Mar-a-Lago and passed on the Taoiseach’s regards, he replied: “I like Leo. He’s a great guy.”
All goes to show that politics can produce some strange bedfellows, but credit to Leo Varadkar for managing to build a rapport with Trump. In Speaking my Mind, he captures Trump fairly accurately, I think, when he describes him as a formidable communicator and intelligent but not knowledgeable. In his public life, Trump is guided by instinct rather than intellect.
In this autobiography, Varadkar recounts his upbringing as a bookish boy from a relatively privileged family in Blanchardstown who went to a private school.
Despite having the build of a rugby player, at school he had no interest in sport. Nonetheless, as a politician he was happy to don a Dublin GAA jersey and Ireland and Leinster rugby shirts – and to enjoy the experience of supporting those teams. He was deeply interested in politics from a very young age.
The book provides a readable account of his unlikely rise in Irish politics, a TD in his late-20s having shunted aside his original political mentor to get the nomination, a full Cabinet Minister just four years later and the State’s youngest Taoiseach in 2017, two years short of his 40th birthday.
He doesn’t try to hide the scale and persistence of his drive to get to the top, and nor does he shy away from acknowledging his mistakes and regrets, for example publicly criticising Garret FitzGerald at a time when the former Taoiseach enjoyed a saintlike status in Fine Gael, and nonchalantly musing about Ireland’s likely need for a second bailout at a time when that idea was a complete no-no.
I recall how badly that intervention went down in Germany at that time as we struggled to re-establish our financial bona-fides there.
His account of coming out as a gay man reveals how hesitant he was on account of the potential risks to his burgeoning career. There is a revealing sentence is which he recalls wondering if the electorate “would accept me and let me get on with the work I was born to do”.
You can’t afford to lack self-confidence if you aspire to run a country.
His self-portrait squares with my own experience of him. He always had a degree of self-assurance that belied his relative youth.
Yet, he was not a natural Irish politician in the manner of his predecessor, Enda Kenny, who almost defined that mould. I remember once in Washington Leo was apprehensive and unenthusiastic about appearing before the local Irish American community, an experience most Irish politicians would have relished.
When he overcame his hesitancy he actually performed very well and was warmly received.
Political leaders are made by the challenges placed in their path. De Valera weathered the storms of World War II, Lemass seeded our economic transformation, Bertie Ahern helped deliver peace in Northern Ireland and Enda Kenny saw us through the upheavals of the great recession.
Varadkar, too, had existential issues with which to grapple – the threat posed to Ireland by Brexit and by the COVID pandemic. He did well on both counts. I was with him in Washington when he announced the shutdown in March 2020.
It was an ominous time and I remember him telling my wife, Greta and me that he was thinking of doing some retraining so that he could do some pandemic-related medical work.
His public statements during the early months of the crisis were well-pitched and, I think, as reassuring as they could have been in those dire circumstances.
Varadkar and his colleagues in government deserve huge credit for the way they managed the dangers of Brexit, working intensively with our EU partners to shore up our position.
There was, he acknowledges, a fear (one that I shared) that Brussels, Berlin and Paris might ultimately pressure us into taking a hit for the EU team but, to the immense credit of those countries, that never happened.
Early in my acquaintance with Leo Varadkar he told me that he did not intend to still be in the Dáil as he approached normal retirement age, but planned to have another chapter to his life after politics.
I was privately sceptical, but in 2024, after his final St Patrick’s Day visit to Washington, he stepped down as Taoiseach.
My sense is that his heart was not fully in it when he returned as Taoiseach in 2022. He acknowledges that by the end of 2023, he just “didn’t love the job any more”. In his political retirement, he has, perhaps surprisingly, paid particular attention to the cause of Irish unity.
Leo Varadkar hit the home straight at just the right time in Ireland. He might not have become Taoiseach had he arrived on the political scene ten years earlier.
He admits to fearing that the ultimate prize had come to him too early, but his advisor, Brian Murphy, reminded him that “opportunities arise when they do and not when they suit”. He grabbed his chance with both hands.
Leo Varadkar scaled the heights on the back of his fluency with the new media of the 21st century. He kept his edgy Twitter handle @CampaignforLeo even after he became Taoiseach.
The atmosphere generated by social media probably also hastened his career’s end as he, and many of his peers, became perennial targets of toxic online abuse in a coarsened political arena.
I am biased when I try to judge a politician in that I tend to look at their performance rather than at those qualities of likeability and consonance of values that voters typically use as a yardstick.
Leo Varadkar was someone you could put him in front of any audience with a confidence that he would acquit himself well.
I am not unduly fond of political memoirs which tend to be relentlessly self-serving, but I did enjoy Leo Varadkar’s account of his relatively short but stellar political innings.
It does some valuable mapping of the highways and byways of Irish politics. History will be the ultimate judge of his record as Taoiseach, but his robust defence of Irish interests over Brexit, facing off against Boris Johnson, stands as a big mark in his favour.
Daniel Mulhall is the retired Irish Ambassador to the USA, the UK and Germany. He is a highly respected author and commentator — his most recent publication is Pilgrim Soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (Dublin: New Island Books, 2023).
Leo Varadkar, Speaking My Mind (publishers Sandycove an imprint of Penguin, 2025), £25.
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