The gloves are off: Leo Varadkar knows next election could come down to a two-party scrap between Fine Gael and Sinn Féin

Philip Ryan

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. Photo: Damien Storan

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. Photo: Damien Storan

Leo Varadkar. Photo: Niall Carson

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. Photo: Damien Storan

June 17 2022 02:30 AM

“Where has this man been the other 99pc of the time?”

That was one Fine Gael TD’s response to Leo Varadkar’s highly personalised attack on Pearse Doherty in the Dáil during Leaders’ Questions.

“This is who we elected as a leader,” was the comment of another TD.

The excitement wasn’t confined to Fine Gael either. “Fianna Fáilers were more delighted about it than us,” one TD said.

During a more fiery than usual Dáil debate, Varadkar dug up a 23-year-old court case involving Doherty and his Sinn Féin colleague Matt Carthy.

The two men were 21 years old at the time and were convicted of public order offences after Doherty called a garda an abusive name.

Doherty and Carthy, along with two other friends, claimed they were beaten up by the arresting gardaí because they were members of Ógra Sinn Féin.

The claim was “totally rejected” by the judge overseeing the case.

However, in a recent interview with the Irish Mail on Sunday, Carthy said there was “friction” between gardaí and Ógra Sinn Féin at the time of the incident. He did not respond to calls yesterday.

When Varadkar presented details of the case to the Dáil, Doherty went remarkably quiet for a TD who generally has no end of things to say – and his party colleagues went to ground too.

Digging up an incident from a decades-old court case could seem petty to many people who may also ask how it prevents Doherty from being a good TD many years later. Doherty himself said yesterday that Varadkar was “grasping” for something as his Government was “failing”.

But senior Fine Gael figures insisted it was “fair game” as Doherty is bookies’ favourite to be the next finance minister and could then have the power to decide the pay of gardaí.

They also said it was in response to Doherty referring to the Garda investigation into claims that Varadkar broke the law by leaking details of a multi-million euro GP contract to a friend.

“People who think Leo should step down for being accused of something need to be asked why they have no problem putting people convicted of crimes into government,” said a senior minister.

Others in Fine Gael note that the long-running investigation into Varadkar is clearly a sore point for the Tánaiste, especially with the changeover in the Taoiseach’s office fast approaching.

“The investigation thing clearly hurts him and Pearse pushed his buttons, but this is what you get when you do it,” another Fine Gael source said.

The ratcheting up of attacks on Sinn Féin is part of a wider strategy by Fine Gael to reinvigorate the party and position themselves to be a very different option to Mary Lou McDonald’s party.

The objective is to paint Sinn Féin as a populist party with a dark past.

It wants to play to the fears of middle Ireland and working families who have grown tired of being governed by Fine Gael for the last decade, but are also wary of throwing their lot behind the one-time political arm of the Provisional IRA.

The other side of this plan is Fine Gael appealing directly to the so-called “squeezed middle”. Varadkar can’t stand in front of a microphone these days without mentioning working families who feel they pay for everything and get nothing in return.

The “people who get up early in the morning” slogan is back in full-scale use.

It’s a long way out from an election – two-and-a-half years or so – and Fine Gael has performed poorly in the last two it fought.

But it has decided to ditch the strategy of trying to be all things to all people and getting very little in return.

Instead, it has gone down the more divisive but potentially electorally astute root of focusing on its base of middle Ireland voters while simultaneously targeting Sinn Féin, which claims to represent the more maligned sections of society.

We could yet be facing into a US-style electoral system of Sinn Féin on the centre left and Fine Gael on the centre right, while all the other parties fight for the scraps.