Varadkar, during his speech yesterday before the Irish Parliament.
The rotation agreed in 2020 by the coalition parties creates an unprecedented situation in the political history of the island
Leo Varadkar will be Prime Minister of Ireland until the March 2025 elections after taking over from Michaél Martin this Saturday in a friendly manner unprecedented in Irish history. A long debate and a meticulous vote, with the Secretary of Parliament reading each name of the deputies and writing down their vote (87 against 72), the Government of the country will continue on the same path thanks to some changes in the Cabinet.
Chance has provided that two politicians of Indian origin, the Irish doctor by profession, and the British Rishi Sunak, a financier, will have great responsibility in the negotiations on the consequences of Brexit in Northern Ireland, which is approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brexit Agreement. Good Friday without autonomous institutions.
The agreement for the rotation between heads of the Executive was signed after the 2020 elections. Varadkar had led the Cabinet for the last three years, but his party, Fine Gael, lost twelve deputies. His rival, Fianna Fáil, led by Martin, subtracted only 7. The big shock of the election was the increase in votes for Sinn Féin. The three parties shared, respectively, 35, 38 and 32 of the 180 seats in the ‘Dáil’, the Dublin Parliament.
The formation historically associated with the IRA obtained the highest number of votes and its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, proposed to govern in coalition, but neither Martin nor Varadkar accepted the possibility of joining Sinn Féin in an Executive. They also did something unprecedented. Never before had Fainna Fáil and Fine Gael, rivals in the Irish civil war (1922-23) that followed the terrorist war against the British presence, walked side by side. They joined the Green Party to have a stable majority.
Housing and infrastructures
The Lower House of Parliament debated the motion proposing Varadkar as the new ‘Taoiseach’, prime minister. The opposition parties and independent deputies criticized the trajectory of the Martin government for the persistence of the problem of access to housing and the lack of progress in the development of infrastructures.
It is a government that has had to manage the pandemic and now the increase in prices. It has been generous in welcoming Ukrainian refugees, some 60,000, and is a fundamental part of the negotiation on the Irish Protocol, which due to its consequences in Northern Ireland has become a barrier to the normalization of relations between the United Kingdom and the EU after Brexit.
The new prime minister will form a Cabinet in which Martin will be foreign minister, with direct responsibility for the diplomacy of the Protocol. In recent weeks, the possibility of a quick agreement that allows the restoration of the autonomous institutions in Northern Ireland, now blocked due to the rejection of the Protocol by the pro-British unionists, has been aired.