Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Leo Varadkar is being played like a fiddle by Brussels

A few decades ago, Irish people would march through the streets of London to holler at the British government: ‘Hands off Ireland!’ As an Irishman, I wish Irish people would now take to the streets of Dublin to say to Leo Varadkar’s government: ‘Hands off Britain!’ For Varadkar’s meddling in British politics, his and his minions’ attempts to scupper Britain’s break from the European Union, is profoundly anti-democratic. What we have here is a foreign leader interfering in Britain’s domestic, democratic affairs. It was wrong when the British did that to Ireland, and it is wrong for the Irish now to do the same to Brexit Britain.

The way Varadkar, the Taoiseach, talks about Britain is astonishing. It is motored by the elitist, practically imperial belief that what is good for his government — his foreign government — is more important than what the British people themselves, in their millions, voted for. 

In recent days he has, in the words

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