That’s the former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, with the sort of friends he liked – as opposed to the voters. In a move that shocked and surprised everyone he quit the other day, saying – in Ardern fashion – that he had nothing left to give to the job.

Bullshit. He got the job in the first place less because of direct political support for him as Taoiseach or his Fine Gael party, than via appointment and then backroom dealing. But after years of pushing for and getting things that he and his elite mates wanted, but which the people didn’t, he finally hit an iceberg, two of them actually:

Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar admitted the government had received “two wallops” from voters, per The Irish Times. According to the outlet, 67.69% voted no on the first referendum on family, and 73.9% voted no on the second referendum. The Irish government admitted the defeat of their woke plan even before all official results were in.
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The two [constitutional] referenda would have changed the definition of family from marriage-based to “durable relationship” based, and aimed “to remove supposedly ‘sexist’ references to women and their role in organising domestic life to a gender-neutral concept of ‘care’,”

I must admit that I was surprised at the results. Ireland has moved very rapidly away from the Roman Catholic church that dominated it for decades, embracing a whole host of things the Church opposes, like gay marriage and abortion. Moreover the change appeared to be gaining momentum with the Irish public failing to even dent the efforts of almost all the political parties on things like immigration and hate speech laws. So to see these two proposals go down to such heavy defeats was unexpected.

US commentator Ace thinks the reason had as much to do with all the preceding as the referenda themselves:

I would say this rejection is based 50% on the amendments themselves, and 50% based on people finally revolting to this constant “Year Zero” disruption of society.

The term “Year Zero” refers to the idea that after Maoists or communists take power, they declare it “Year Zero” of the New Age, and set about to pulling down all statues, burning all books, denouncing all traditions, and eradicating everything normal and decent in their mad drive to remake all of humanity in the twisted, ugly image of communist malcontent losers. There was no history before. We decide what history is right now, in Year Zero.

And we’ve all been living in Year Zero since George Floyd swallowed a huge bolus of drugs and died due to his own poor life choices.

And people have had enough.

I’d also add in the Great Chinese Lung Rot Pandemic as a marker of a Year Zero attempt, in that it was a test of how far the ruling classes could push ordinary people: regrettably that turned out to be a long way.

Over at Spiked the political editor, Brendan O’Neill, sums it up pretty well in a long, detailed piece:

Varadkar’s rule was government of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. His government against the people added up to an attempted reordering of how people think, what they may say, what their communities should look like and even how they should relate to the constitution. All had to be bent to the fanatical whims of a taoiseach who was never even called upon by the people to govern. . .

If you think that’s an exaggeration, here’s the detail to back it up:

The Varadkar clique signed up to the gender cult too, leading to the imprisonment of violent men in women’s prisons. He was a Net Zero apostle, once calling on Ireland’s farmers to become ‘more sustainable’, to ‘reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ and ‘improve biodiversity’. Who cares that such demands threaten the livelihoods of farmers and the future of dairy farming – in Varadkar’s Ireland, even food production played second fiddle to the re-engineering of the nation as woke, open and green.

That sounds familiar. Yet another example of how most, if not all, Western nations could swap their political parties and yet see no real change on the local scene: Varadkar-is-Biden-is-Sunak-is-Ardern-is-Starmer-is-Macron-is-Albanese-is…..

[C]onsider his stance on immigration. Under Varadkar immigration and asylum rose hugely and his clique looked down upon anyone who raised concerns as racist. Country people and working people who worried out loud about immigration’s impact on small town life or public services or jobs risked being sneered at by their distant overlords in Dublin. You’re xenophobic, would come the rebuke. Varadkar made it clear that local communities would have no veto over who can live among them.
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Consider his infamous hate-speech bill. Across the world people have expressed alarm at the tyranny that would flow from it. Its promise to punish, severely, ‘incitement to hatred’ on account of a person’s race, gender or religion could easily give rise to the criminalisation of opinion. The opinion that a person’s assumed gender is bullshit, for example. Or a feminist refusing to say she / her about a he / him. Or an individual floridly bristling at mass immigration. All might be judged hateful by the state and fined, even jailed. 

Unfortunately, while that last idea has been beaten back in places like New Zealand and Ireland, there are still parts of the Western World where they are actually in place, now including Scotland:

Police Scotland will record all hate crimes and hate incidents in terms of the following definitions: Hate Incident – Any incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group but which does not constitute a criminal offence (non-crime incident).

You can read the rest of the detail at the link but while it includes Disability, Race, Religion, Sexual Orientation and Trandgender Identity (all of these with the added key words, “or presumed”), it doesn’t include the actual sex of a person – which thus opens the door to Trans-folk being able to hate on women. And the Scottish Police will be there to help the Trans:

The Scottish police are now training cops with a scenario defaming J.K. Rowling. And they specifically name a hypothetical person named “Jo” — J.K. Rowling’s first name is Joanna, and she goes by Jo — as someone who hates trans people and wants to “send them to gas chambers” and who will soon be sent to prison.

The danger of what this insanity has done to the law is described well here by a Scottish political commentator:

If someone declares that I have been motivated by hatred there will be no defence of demonstrating that I wasn’t so motivated, for instance because I was unaware that the person had a protected characteristic, because the legal definition is based on the victim’s perception.

But how does the victim know what my motivation was? Can he see into my mind?

Oh well. We can at least celebrate the setback of these people in Ireland on those issues of marriage and motherhood, while also noting that a slow change may be underway with Gen-Z and beyond, as they react to a half-century of counter-cultural fail, Marriage And Family, Not Money And Career, Are The Key To A Fulfilling Life

“Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared with peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”

That’s one Brad Wilcox, from his new book, Get Married, where he points out the staggering levels of loneliness and unhappiness among people who are childless and unmarried. Given the overwhelming cultural propaganda in my lifetime that told young people that having a career, piling up the wealth and having “experiences” before getting married and having children, marking that down as less fulfilling, that’s hardly a surprise.

I know more than few Boomer and Gen-X women who are suffering as a result of this, and not a few men too, time having run out for them. By contrast I’m surprised by how many Gen-Z men and women are holding together in long-term relationships. I’ll grant that I’ve seen only a few get married so far, but there’s nothing like the culture of multi-partner bonking that I grew up in.

Perhaps this rejection by the Irish of the elites efforts to wipe out all tradition is a marker of a turn away from Ace’s Year Zero? Probably not a turn to a “reactionary” past, but one decidedly more conservative than the likes of Mr Varadkar imagined.