Leo Varadkar, looking relaxed as he sits in a room in the home of his partner’s sister in Indianapolis, is catching up with long-offered invitations, freed of the labours of the office of taoiseach.
Last weekend, he took up an invitation made a decade ago by the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana to watch the local team play in a highly competitive college football match.
“I don’t know if you remember ‘The Gathering’ and my time a million years ago as Transport, Tourism and Sport Minister, but I had a connection with Notre Dame since then, but never got to visit in an official capacity,” he told The Irish Times.
“It is quite a spectacle. I saw them in Dublin before but it’s quite a different thing when it’s on campus,” he said, remembering to correctly identify Notre Dame’s opponents as “Miami, Ohio, not Florida”.
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Earlier in his trip, Varadkar sat down for “a fireside” off-record conversation in Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Centre with the university’s professor of modern Irish history, Colin Barr, the director of the Clingen Family Centre for the Study of Modern Ireland.
Held under Chatham House rules, where the content is not made public, Varadkar said the discussion ranged from Irish unification to Irish-British-European Union relations to Irish-US relations.
On Thursday, the former taoiseach will be in Derry to speak to the SDLP’s New Ireland Commission after meeting pupils from local secondary schools.
Varadkar will speak on the record, and he will have things to say, including a call on all parties contesting the next Dáil general election to pledge in their manifestos to make Irish unity “an objective, not just an aspiration”.
In addition, they should agree to establish a New Ireland Forum, modelled on the body set up in 1983 by Fine Gael taoiseach Garret FitzGerald at the urging of the then SDLP leader John Hume to find ways of bringing “lasting peace and stability” to a new Ireland.
Chaired by the president of what was then University College Galway, Colm Ó hEocha, the forum produced a report in May 1984 that recommended three models: a unitary state, a federal-confederal state, or joint British-Irish authority over Northern Ireland.
The document led to a furious response from then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who dismissed the alternatives one by one, saying: “that is out” – in remarks known to history as her “out, out, out” speech.
On his call to the political parties, Varadkar said his speech “would tease out some of the details about what a proposal on unification would look like and study how we would merge the two systems – judicial, education, welfare and health.”
Varadkar favours a New Ireland Forum Mark II rather than the citizens’ assemblies that have been frequently used in the Republic over the last decade to tease out contentious issues.
“This isn’t the topic where you pick a hundred citizens, randomly selected. There would be real difficulties, because a minority would come from the North and a minority, again, would come from a Protestant/unionist/loyalist background.
“I think they would feel crowded out,” said Varadkar, adding that the forum model would be able to include political parties and civic groups with a “better chance of producing a report and teasing out some of the issues”.
Seen as the “greenest” Fine Gael leader in the party’s history, Varadkar insisted that he intended to remain vocal on the issue, believing unity is an issue that “should exist beyond core activists”.
“For a lot of people, unification is an aspiration, it’s an idea. Whereas I think it needs to become an objective for the next government in Ireland, no matter who’s in that government,” he said.
Unity is not “inevitable”, he said: “[But] I think almost all trends point towards unification in the next few decades. I can’t put a timeline, but in the next few decades. There are lots of different things in its favour.
“There are the demographics, the fact that the Republic is so much more prosperous now than the North, and then also that Brexit has changed the UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world,” he said.
His speech in the SSE Arena in Belfast in June to the pro-unity campaign group Ireland’s Future, where he called for current budget surpluses to be put aside to pay for unity, raised eyebrows in Dublin.
There, some wondered whether Varadkar was moving farther down the line than his successor, Simon Harris, who on taking office said unity was “an aspiration, but not a priority”.
Varadkar chuckles when faced with this argument.
“Look, one of the great things about stepping back from electoral politics is I don’t really have to worry about what people in politics or in the media really think about me any more,” he said.
“It’s not something I’m overly concerned about; I say what I think is true and I do what I think is right and I don’t have to be worrying about tiptoeing around that kind of stuff any more,” he said.
“There are many in Fine Gael who see us as ‘the united Ireland’ party and want us to be the party that plays a role, who see the work of the party’s founding fathers like [Michael] Collins and [WT] Cosgrave and others to be incomplete and would like to see it completed.”
During Brexit, Varadkar and the then minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney became hate figures for some within the unionist community because of the stand they took during the negotiations.
Today, Varadkar believes all of that was “overstated”.
“While that may be true of some people, a lot of other people have a favourable perception of me, notwithstanding that hardliners were targeting me,” he said.
Many in Northern Ireland, he believed, appreciated the fact that he went there frequently during his time as taoiseach, and that “I engaged on different issues” with people from all communities.
Turning to the arguments around unification, Varadkar believes there has been too much focus on the costs to be borne, and on the flag and anthem that would later represent the unified state.
“There’s almost too much concentration on the flags and symbols element. I can understand that. But I think it’s the more practical implications that we need to tease through,” he said.
The costs can be managed, he believes.
“If we extend the kind of economic policies we have in the South to the North, then the North will grow faster and in time can catch up. Now is the time that we have the money to set some aside to pay for the transition costs,” he said.
New ideas will be needed to map the future. Offering a few of his own, he suggested that the new state could have “a president and a vice-president, with one of them being a British citizen”.
“We’ll need a bigger cabinet too. There’s a strong case for a cabinet [with] up to 20 members, or that there should be a minimum number in the cabinet who are British citizens. Those are the kind of things we need to think about,” he said.
Varadkar concludes the interview by defining how he sees his future role in the discussion around unification.
“I don’t see myself as leading this, or wanting to lead it in any way,” he said. “But I definitely want to be part of it.”
