Simon Harris has described himself as an “accidental politician”, but his meteoric rise to become Ireland’s youngest taoiseach has been meticulously planned.
“When there are opportunities, you have to take them,” Harris, 37, once told Ireland’s Hot Press magazine.
A councillor aged just 22, a member of the Dáil, Ireland’s parliament, at 24, a junior finance minister at 27, health minister at 29, higher education minister at 33 — Harris on Sunday took the helm of the centre-right Fine Gael party following the shock resignation of Leo Varadkar.
Harris was the only candidate to seek the party leadership, and will be confirmed as premier on April 9 — crowning an ambition he is reported to have harboured since childhood.
“Life came at me a lot faster than I expected it to,” Harris, who dropped out of college to work for a prominent senator in 2008, told Hot Press. Now, he faces the task of reinvigorating the centre-right Fine Gael ahead of a general election due by March 2025.
Described by colleagues as energetic, enthusiastic and compassionate, Harris mounted what commentator Johnny Fallon called a “blitzkrieg” campaign, securing sufficient endorsements to ensure that within 24 hours of Varadkar’s resignation, he was the unopposed leadership candidate.
Widely seen as engaging but canny, Harris is known for his “incredible hard work, incredible people skills” and for being “one of the most accessible people in Irish politics”, said Ivan Yates, a former Fine Gael minister.
Harris acquired an early taste for politics after campaigning for autism support, inspired by the situation of his younger brother, who has Asperger’s syndrome.
Despite rising to the top of Fine Gael — which has been in power since 2011 in various coalitions — without serving a day in opposition, Harris’s first steps in politics were as a teenager canvassing for the rival Fianna Fáil party.
However, he joined Fine Gael’s youth wing at the age of 16, winning election as a county councillor in 2009, followed by election to the Dáil in 2011 as the member for Wicklow, becoming the house’s youngest member.
The son of a taxi driver and a school special needs assistant from Greystones in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, as higher education minister he championed apprenticeship schemes, securing a record number of apprentices in construction and other trades and telling local media that Ireland had become “a bit too snobby or elitist” about education.
He quit his own journalism and French studies in the Dublin Institute of Technology to enter politics but remained a savvy communicator. He once told the powerful Dáil public accounts committee to “chillax” and owes his new nickname, the “TikTok Taoiseach”, to his social media skills.
Like Varadkar, who was 38 when he first became taoiseach, Harris “assiduously canvassed members of the party in terms of becoming leader”, said Kevin Cunningham, a politics lecturer at Technological University Dublin and founder of pollster Ireland Thinks.
“He’s hungry for it,” said one former senior Fine Gael figure who has known Harris for two decades. “He’s been planning this for years.”
While supporters see Harris as candid, critics view him as an opportunist, relentless in his pursuit of career advancement. Higher education was a new portfolio that could have been seen as a lesser cabinet role, but Harris used it to travel widely, getting himself known and making connections, the former Fine Gael figure said.
Harris at first backed leaving Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion unchanged, before acknowledging that he had changed his mind and supporting the 2018 referendum that legalised the procedure.
During the pandemic, he apologised on social media for his own “awful boo boo” as health minister, when he told a radio interviewer there had been 18 other coronaviruses before Covid-19, calling himself “an awful old idiot at times”.
But he came under fire in 2018 over a state cover-up on incorrect cervical cancer checks, one of the country’s most shocking scandals, that led the former head of the country’s health service to describe him as a “frightened little boy” who “runs scared of headlines”.
Harris was criticised for setting targets for waiting times for surgery to treat children with scoliosis that were then missed and also came under fire for long healthcare waiting lists and for the spiralling cost of a new children’s hospital. Darragh O’Brien, now the housing minister, said at the time Harris was “clearly overwhelmed”.
Harris survived a confidence vote in 2019 and faced the threat of another in 2020. However, Varadkar, who was facing defeat, called a general election instead.
Now, having secured his dream, Harris, who has two small children, will have his work cut out.
Fine Gael, which governs in coalition with the centrist Fianna Fáil and Green Party, has struggled to grow its vote share. A hammering in two constitutional referendums this month made the government look out of touch.
“A significant number of people are sick of Fine Gael and think it’s been in power too long,” said Gary Murphy, politics professor at Dublin City University.
“It’s a busted flush. The party is running on exhaust fumes,” said Yates. “There is no expectation that Harris is going to provide a miracle cure.”
Harris vowed on Friday that “you ain’t seen nothing yet”. A cabinet veteran, he may not be a fresh face, but as the former senior Fine Gael figure put it: “He is still very much the Young Turk, despite the grey hair.”
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