Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

They say a week is a long time in politics. What about a morning? There will be a lot of political reflections this morning about the news about our party leader and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, but I will add some personal reflections. He has been my friend for more than 30 years and I hope we will be friends for over 30 more. As teenagers the politics seeped out of our pores and we were both quite heavily opinionated from a very early age. It would be fair to say that I probably came from the centre-left when I was that age and he was centre-right. Over the years we have met in the middle. Sometimes I despair that young people might think the centre of politics cannot be radical and it cannot be challenging, whereas it can. My whole life I have been inspired by responsible radicals and I think our democracy needs brave people like that more than ever.

The proud legacy he leaves in Dublin West can be seen every day in our hospital, our university and our schools. I thank his family as well for all the support they have given the party in Dublin West: Miriam, Ashok, Sonia, Sophie, their husbands and Leo's nephews, whom he is so proud of.Of course he will continue to work in Dublin West and I look forward to working with him. He has done so much in terms of nurturing this machine of an economy that we have, guiding us through Covid, his work on Northern Ireland as a proud nationalist and champion of the Good Friday Agreement. I am just so very proud of my friend and so grateful to my colleague and his loyalty. Sometimes I think the persona we saw is not what I know and I just want to say how proud and grateful I am this morning.