Leo Varadkar resigns: ‘LGBT and abortion rights my proudest achievements’

Leo Varadkar has placed ‘LGBT and abortion rights’ among his proudest achievements, as he announced his resignation as Taoiseach and party leader.

After Varadkar first became Fine Gael party leader and Taoiseach in 2017, he held a referendum to liberalise abortion and the public voted to remove constitutional protections from the unborn. While serving as Health Minister in 2015, he announced that he was homosexual and campaigned for Ireland to legalise same-sex marriage.

He will remain the Fine Gael TD for Dublin West but has resigned as party leader and will remain Taoiseach until a replacement is elected next month.

‘Humiliating’

In Varadkar’s resignation speech, he said: “I’m proud that we have made the country a more equal and more modern place when it comes to the rights of children, the LGBT community, equality for women and their bodily autonomy.”

Although he said his “reasons for stepping down now are personal and political”, journalist Ruth Dudley Edwards highlighted that it was “under his leadership that the government a couple of weeks ago lost two atrociously badly-framed referendums that were essentially pointless”.

One amendment to the Constitution, promoting “durable relationships” as equal to marriage, was rejected by 67.69 per cent of votes, and a second on ending the State’s commitment to stay-at-home mums was voted down by 73.93 per cent.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Dudley Edwards said: “They horrified a large section of the population who saw them as an attack on the family, not least in taking the words woman and mother out of the constitution. The outcome was among the most humiliating referendum results ever for any government.”

‘Wallop’

Following the landslide defeats for the coalition’s plans to change the Irish Constitution to downgrade marriage and motherhood, Varadkar conceded: “Clearly we got it wrong. I think Enda Kenny famously said once that the electorate often gives the Government a wallop, this was two wallops.”

Ireland’s former Minister for Defence Willie O’Dea said “people were confused as to why, when the country had so many problems to be getting on with in relation to lack of housing, healthcare and law and order, why the Government were diverting time and energy on these referenda for which there were no popular demand”.

The Fianna Fáil TD urged his party, which is in coalition with Fine Gael and the Greens, “to get back to basics & abandon the Hate Speech Bill etc. Focus on Housing, Health and Law & Order and stop playing to the woke gallery”.