Leo Varadkar

Biography

Leo Varadkar was born in Dublin in 1979 to an Indian-born doctor and an Irish nurse. He attended The King's Hospital school, joined Young Fine Gael at sixteen and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 2003. He worked as a junior hospital doctor and later qualified as a general practitioner, while entering local politics on Fingal County Council, first by co-option in 2003 and then by topping the national first-preference poll in the 2004 local elections.

Elected to Dáil Éireann for Dublin West in 2007, he joined Enda Kenny's cabinet in 2011 as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, then served as Minister for Health from 2014 and Minister for Social Protection from 2016. In January 2015 he spoke publicly about being gay, becoming the first serving Irish minister to do so, and campaigned for the same-sex marriage referendum that year.

After Kenny stepped down, Varadkar beat Simon Coveney for the Fine Gael leadership and became Taoiseach in June 2017, the youngest holder of the office to that point and the first from an ethnic minority. His government held the 2018 referendum that removed the constitutional ban on abortion, and much of his first term was taken up with negotiating the Irish border arrangements of Brexit. After the 2020 general election he formed a coalition with Fianna Fáil and the Greens under a rotation deal, serving as Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment before returning as Taoiseach in December 2022.

Varadkar resigned as Fine Gael leader in March 2024 and as Taoiseach in April, handing over to Simon Harris, and did not stand in the 2024 general election. He later joined the public-relations firm Penta Group as an adviser and published a memoir, Speaking My Mind, in 2025.