Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil rapidly becoming sister parties, says Leo

FINE Gael and Fianna Fáil are ‘rapidly becoming sister parties’, Leo Varadkar has said.

The Civil War rivals put a century of animosity behind them to form a historic Coalition for the first time, following the 2020 election.

Mr Varadkar this week announced he will not be contesting the next general election, after he resigned as Taoiseach in March. And as he prepares to leave political life behind, the former Fine Gael leader has admitted his own party and Fianna Fáil are not ‘vastly different’ and are ‘rapidly becoming sister parties’.

The outgoing Dublin West TD said the differences between the two former rivals ‘are not huge, that’s the truth’.

‘I think we’re rapidly becoming sister parties,’ he added. ‘I don’t think we’re vastly different, but there are differences.’

Before the formation of a three-party coalition with the Greens in 2020, Fianna Fáil supported a Fine Gael minority government since 2016.

‘We’re together now nearly nine years, and I think there’s a very good chance after the next election that you could see another coalition led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and possibly another rotating Taoiseach,’ he told RTÉ’s Today With Claire Byrne yesterday.

However, he said he doesn’t see a merger between the parties in the ‘foreseeable future’.

‘Sometimes when you add two parties together, what you get at the end of that is actually a bigger party that’s smaller, if that makes sense,’ he said.

‘And we saw that before with Labour and Democratic Left when they merged.’

He said any electoral benefit to a merger can’t be assumed. ‘We’ve a different history and a different tradition,’ he said. ‘It’s fair to say we’re -a bit more committed to European integration than they would be. We would be more enthusiastic about reducing income taxes than they would, not that they’re against that, but we would always be pushing that a bit more.

‘On housing, for example, we probably push home ownership more strongly than social housing; they would do it the other way around.’ Fine Gael Parliamentary Party chair Alan Farrell said the historical reasons why the parties exist will mean some members will not want to coalesce. He said: ‘From a policy perspective of late, any academic who does research into the policy differences will see very little.’

He said the only reason there are two main parties of the centre in Ireland is due to our history, and that he does not see a merger between the two.

Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea said his party is a ‘separate party, with its own separate identity’. He has called for it to outline how it is different to Fine Gael with a ‘distinctive’ manifesto for the next election.

He said there will never be a merger between the parties, adding: ‘The whole would be less than the sum of the parts.’

‘I don’t think we’re vastly different’