Joan Burton ‘full of admiration’ for Leo Varadkar

Tánaiste Joan Burton said she was "full of admiration" for the manner in which her constituency colleague Leo Varadkar disclosed he was gay.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Health Leo Varadkar both represent the constituency of Dublin West. Giving her first public reaction to Mr Varadkar's disclosure during a radio interview, Ms Burton described his performance as brilliant and courageous.

“I was full of admiration for the way in which he handled what was in some ways a very challenging interview in human terms.

“His private life is very private and to come out and talk about it as he did required a lot of courage,” she said.

Ms Burton said she had sent Mr Varadkar a text immediately after his hour-long interview with Miriam O'Callaghan on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday morning.

“I sent him a text saying I thought he did a brilliant interview, wishing him the best . . . I thought he emerged looking extremely happy after the interview.

“Congratulations to him for doing what he did, it was really a brilliant interview,” she said.

Ms Burton is the latest in a large number of political colleagues of Mr Varadkar who have welcomed his announcement and praised his courage for doing so.

RTÉ also said that there has been a phenomenal response to the interview. The broadcaster says it was inundated with thousands of texts and messages of support. Reports on the disclosure were also carried by Time and the BBC.

Enormous online reaction

According to web and social media analysts, the announcement led to an enormous reaction online, generating what was possibly the highest ever response on Twitter to a political event.

One specialist analyst, Red Flag, said the announcement resulted in 56,000 impressions per minute for over seven hours, with tweets on Mr Varadkar’s disclosure generating 16,300 Twitter impressions per second at the peak of the interview at around 10.25am.

Bríd Murphy of Red Flag said: "In my experience this was the biggest Twitter political story in Ireland. As a result of the announcement coming out of the blue, the online community reacted in their thousands, resulting in just short of 1 million impressions in one minute alone."