The Irish Times view on the Leo Varadkar leak: lasting damage

The decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) that there should be no prosecution of Tánaiste Leo Varadkar for his leaking of a confidential government document to a friend in 2019 brings to an end the long-running and damaging saga for Varadkar and his party.

Having been sent the file in April, the DPP is to be commended for a relatively prompt decision. Its conclusion now avoids the issue returning in the autumn when it would have dominated and disrupted preparations for the changeover in the Government – which will likely see Varadkar again assume the Taoiseach’s office, and Micheál Martin become Tánaiste – scheduled for mid-December. The same cannot be said for the Garda, whose investigation of a relatively straightforward case took more than a year; it’s hard to see why.

Varadkar will be relieved at the decision not to prosecute him – an event which would have surely ended his political career and plunged the Government into crisis – but he has acknowledged again that the leaking of the document to his friend was a mistake. The DPP has not, after all, decided that he was right to leak the document, merely that no law was broken in doing so. It remains a substantial error of judgment. There is little doubt that Varadkar has been damaged by the affair, and the “Leo the leak” label will hardly be left behind here. That punishment probably fits the infraction.

But there has been something disturbing about the highly personalised and vituperative campaign waged against Varadkar since the story was first broken by Village magazine. A decent scoop with a legitimate public interest subsequently curdled into something nastier online, where too many people leap to routinely label politics as corrupt, criminal, sleazy and toxic.

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The universal discrediting of all politicians in the ugliest terms, now par for the course in many online spaces where politics and public affairs are discussed, is not just unfair to many politicians – it is corrosive of our democracy.