Ruth Dudley Edwards: He quit politics in 2024 but a life in the corporate world should suit former taoiseach Leo Varadkar just fine
I had never heard of Penta, until ex-taoiseach Leo Varadkar joined its Global Advisory Board a few months back.
Washington-based Penta describes itself as “the world’s first stakeholder solutions firm, offering data-driven strategies for navigating uncertainty and enhancing brand reputation worldwide.”
Sounds like corporate gibberish to me, but having been a close student of Varadkar – whom I thought smug and superficial – and especially his pronouncements on Northern Ireland, I thought he would fit in there just fine.
He had, we should remember, “over two decades of leadership experience at the highest levels of government”.
He quit politics in 2024, but being an ex-prime minister confers a lot of status, even if you have what might be called “mixed reviews” of your performance.
He also has influential friends.
There’s Conal McDevitt, the Penta president, born in Dublin but brought up in Spain, whose varied career began as national secretary of Labour Youth (Ireland) and vice president of ECOSY (European Community Organisation of Socialist Youth), graduated through progressive and nationalist causes and took him to the heights as an SDLP MLA for South Belfast, although that came to an abrupt end in September 2013.
Few now remember much about the row that made him resign from the assembly, but it was precipitated by the revelation of undeclared payments for PR work after he was elected to Stormont.
Three months later he joined the Irish lobbying firm of Hume (son of the famous John) Brophy – as a “strategic communications and government relations consultant specialising in Anglo-Irish affairs and EU affairs”.
EU job opportunities in a world of consultancies seem to be limitless.
Hume’s have included senior positions “within the global duty-free industry”.
The highly successful firm was acquired by Penta in 2023, where he is a senior advisor.
Varadkar is yet another nationalist who has effortlessly slipped into lucrative employment in internationalist circles.
Few of them seem to think much about what’s going on back home except that the Irish are great and unionists are dinosaurs.
One of the reasons I left Ireland in 1965 was its knee-jerk nationalism and intolerance of dissent.
It’s a very sophisticated place now, but those characteristics are not far below the surface, which I why I so much revere those who think for themselves.
I wrote last week about the intrepid Caolan Robertson, who is enraging the establishment by revealing the uncomfortable truth that while the Irish think of themselves as best friends of Ukraine, they seem unbothered about a Russian-owned Limerick aluminium plant that supplies the Russian arms industry.
Now I’d like to introduce to you another dissenter, a Queen’s graduate, an engineer, a hugely respected economist and strategist called Sinéad O’Sullivan.
She has written an utterly brilliant account of how Ireland has fallen into the trap of all small states that squander unearned windfalls that I’ll come back to in another column.
“Ireland has not built a society, it has built a tax jurisdiction,” she says, which is why its people feel poor.
She pointed out to Varadkar – now lecturing at Harvard – that Ireland was facing crisis after crisis because it had failed to build the necessary institutions to make it run properly.
His response was: “You’d fail my class.”