Lewis Carroll would be proud of Dr Leo Varadkar. The best way to understand this country is to
use a looking glass. When this week
Brendan Howlin stepped into the debate about when the new president would be
inaugurated, I thought it strange. We
have a presidential commission, we can inaugurate a president on the day or as
close as possible to November 11th. That could have allowed our
president to attend centenary events to mark the end of WW1 as acting President
and come home to be inaugurated on November 12th.
But November 12th was already in the diary for
Donald Trump. So we’ll get the president inaugurated in the wee small hours of
November 11th rushed off to Flanders Fields and home to tug at the
forelock of one of the world’s great misogynists, bigots and liars.
Exactly a week ago, social media was wall to wall with FG
supporters clapping Dr Varadkar on the back as to how well he’d done by putting
the pope in his box over historic child abuse cases in Ireland. The Donald well
be a much bigger fish to fry.
The real measure of Leo’s thoroughly modern Ireland will be
if he has the political guts to tell Trump as he once promised what’s what in
an international context. But nobody is holding their breathe on this one.
Because at the back of it we all know that Dr Varadkar is
the luckiest of our Taoisigh ever. He has the EU negotiating for him, he has a
divided opposition and thinks he is popular. How anyone could get to be
Taoiseach without serving in an economic ministry is unusual. Sure what could
possibly go wrong?
His problem might be that when luck runs out as it
eventually must, it runs out like a light and is gone before you know it. There
will be demonstrations and it will negatively impact on Varadkar’s popularity.
And all the blarney and ballyhoo won’t hide it this time.
It never does, not even in wonderland.
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