#sorry that this is a break from my regular tumblr output

[mercureality]

my big mood atm is every international article about ireland electing our first gay Taoiseach (prime minister/leader of the country), who happens to be the son of an Indian immigrant and will be the youngest leader of a European Country when he takes the position, is the irish comments underneath yelling into the void that he’s actually pretty right wing by our standards and that:

he’s going to inherit the position through in-party voting rather than a general election, following our current Taoiseach Enda Kenny (in office since 2011, having been reelected in 2016) stepping down as leader due to backlash over a number of different issues i’m not gonna get into rn - the important thing is that Ireland didn’t vote nationally to elect Varadkar as his successor

he cut mental health funding by €12 million when he was the minister for health

spoke out against gay adoption when discussing his opposition of the civil partnership bill in 2009/2010 which didn’t touch upon the issue itself, saying that the right for a child to have a mother and a father was “much more important than the right of two men to have a family or two women to have a family” - i mean he wasn’t out at the time and he did a u-turn on this during the marriage equality referendum which he did support but imo it was so unnecessary/gross in the first place and was something that undoubtedly caused hurt and anger in the irish lgbt+ community at the time

he's pro-life

he recently headed a severely ugly €200,845 campaign as Minister for Social Protection with the slogan “welfare cheats cheat us all,” urging members of the public to report those they suspect of welfare fraud, resulting in the reveal that the Department of Social Protection has only identified one case of suspected social-welfare identity fraud in the last year

he wants to ban “essential” public sector workers from being able to strike

and he’s generally vocalised his classist/elitist sentiments time and time again throughout his career, like claiming that he represents “people who get up early in the morning” to go to work

oh look, here he is using what’s meant to be a fun Christmas themed article in The Irish Times to say that his least favourite Christmas film is A Christmas Carol because “Tiny Tim should get a job”  ha    haaaaaa  ah  

i could probably say more but imma leave it with his existence as having spawned these articles on Waterford Whispers News (a satirical news site which is basically the Irish version of The Onion although waaaay more consistent imho):

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what people should be celebrating is that neither his sexuality nor his ethnicity had any effect on his bid for leadership in the first place in the context of other irish politicians speaking out about him, the Fine Gael party membership, the press and the public

indeed Varadkar himself stated in the 2015 interview with RTÉ in which he came out: “It’s not something that defines me. I’m not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician, or a gay politician, for that matter. It’s just part of who I am. It doesn’t define me. It is part of my character, I suppose.” - i mean this is still conceptually cool but v much coloured by all the above and not happening in a vaccum (sidenote: you can read Una Mullally’s thoughts on Varadkar’s impending role as Ireland’s first gay leader here, she’s a leading Irish Times columnist and commentator on the LGBT+ issues, who’s also a part of the community herself)

i mean he’s not theresa may, he’s not trump (and was actually the first irish politician to speak out against current Taoiseach Enda Kenny possibly inviting him to Ireland while Kenny was on the Taoiseach’s annual trip to the White House this past St Patrick’s day in the light of his presidency), and he’s certainly not le pen. 

(one thing I’m eternally grateful for is that Ireland doesn’t have an equivalent far right party/movement as we’ve seen the rise of in many other countries in recent years. Our most right wing party Renua [est. 2015] gained no seats in the Dáil [our parliament], no seats in the Seanad [our Senate] and only two out of the 949 available seats for local government [all in the 2016 general election]. The only two parties who’ve ever had a leader in the position of Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael [the latter of which Varadkar has been elected leader of], are centrist parties in their current incarnations, though admittedly centre-right. However, out of the 10 parties you could vote for in the general election, the remaining 7 are all varying degrees of left wing.)  

tl;dr: regardless, there’re still many many reasons not to vibe with leo varadkar imo and i’m going to continue feeling a kinship with disgruntled irish commenters: