Adams draws laughter from Dáil with story about pilates class with Varadkar

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams has challenged incoming Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to adopt the approach of former Fianna Fáil taoiseach Albert Reynolds and to "do the right thing" on the North.

During the Dáil debate on Mr Varadkar’s nomination as Taoiseach, Mr Adams also said he feared “Mr Varadkar will drag this Government to the right”.

He criticised his tenure as minister for health with the trolley crisis and move to privatisation and noted his campaign against social welfare cheats.

But he said “I think he is a decent man. I wish him well.”

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Mr Adams provoked sustained laughter when he said: “I do not know him well though he and I once attended the same pilates class,” then added:

“We couldn’t get the former taoiseach to stretch as far as that.”

He pointed to Mr Varadkar’s comment that Sinn Féin represented the biggest threat to democracy. “This is a nonsense and he knows it.”

Mr Adams said the Dáil sometimes took the form of theatre “of cheap shots and slander and demonisation and playing to the lowest common denominator”.

He said: “I hope the new Taoiseach does not repeat that mistake,” adding that Mr Varadkar should maybe “get to know Sinn Féin and follow the example of the late Albert Reynolds”.

Mr Reynolds “was the first taoiseach to make the difference when the peace process needed it. When others talked the talk, Albert walked the walk.”

Mr Adams said “he was able to do so because he had an affinity with the North, because in many ways he was not enthralled to the system but especially because he was new to the office.

“So Albert Reynolds did the right thing when the prevailing political mood and most of the media agenda was against this.”

Mr Adams added: “Leo Varadkar also has the opportunity to do the right thing and he could allay the fears and worries of ordinary people of what he will do.”

He appealed to Mr Varadkar to move away from the “easy rhetoric of a republic of opportunity to the hard task of building a real rights-based republic with a plan to eradicate inequalities”.

Leo Varadkar could be a Taoiseach who invests in rural Ireland and an Ireland “where no child calls a hotel room home”.

He said the eighth amendment was a relic of the past and had to go.

He said there had to be changes and this had to start with the removal of the Garda Commissioner.

Sinn Féin health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly said she hoped Mr Varadkar “can find it within yourself to be benevolent and to work for a fair society” but she said “I have seen nothing to give me hope that you will be anything other than the most right-wing Taoiseach this country has ever seen”.

She highlighted his €200,000 campaign against welfare cheats but said “I have never heard you challenge the state of tax avoidance and evasion in Ireland”.

Referring to Mr Varadkar’s approach to abortion, she said that in a state where women “have virtually zero reproductive rights” the incoming Taoiseach had compared women travelling for terminations to “a lad’s holiday” to Spain.

And she raised some laughter including from Mr Varadkar when she said “past performance is an indicator of future performance”.