The rotation agreed in 2020 by the coalition parties creates an unprecedented situation in the political history of the island
Leo Varadkar will serve as Prime Minister of Ireland until the March 2025 election after amicably taking over from Michaél Martin this Saturday, an unprecedented event in Irish history. After a long debate and a scrupulous vote, in which the secretary of parliament reads each of the deputies’ names and writes down their votes (87 to 72), the country’s government will continue on the same path thanks to some cabinet changes.
Chance has determined that two politicians of Indian descent, the Irish doctor by profession, and Britain’s Rishi Sunak, a financier, will be given major responsibility in negotiating the impact of Brexit in Northern Ireland, which is twenty-five years away from the Brexit deal Good Friday without autonomous institutions.
The agreement for the rotation of the heads of the executive was signed after the 2020 elections. Varadkar had led the cabinet for the past three years, but his party, Fine Gael, lost 12 deputies. His rival, Fianna Fáil, led by Martin, only deducted 7. The big shock of the election was the increase in votes for Sinn Féin. The three parties shared 35, 38 and 32 respectively of the 180 seats in the ‘Dáil’, Dublin’s parliament.
The formation traditionally linked to the IRA received the largest number of votes and its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, proposed governing in a coalition, but neither Martin nor Varadkar accepted the option of joining Sinn Féin in an executive power. They also did something unprecedented. Never before have 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.
The House of Representatives debated the motion proposing Varadkar as the new ‘Taoiseach’, prime minister. The opposition parties and independent deputies criticized the direction taken by the Martin government because of the persistent problem of access to housing and the lack of progress in infrastructure development.
It is a government that has had to contain the pandemic and now the rise in prices. It has been generous in welcoming Ukrainian refugees, some 60,000, and is a fundamental part of the negotiations on the Irish Protocol, which due to its effects 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 become foreign minister, with direct responsibility for Protocol diplomacy. In recent weeks, the possibility of a swift deal has been raised that would allow the restoration of autonomous institutions in Northern Ireland, now blocked due to the rejection of the Protocol by pro-British trade unionists.
Source: La Verdad
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