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By Michael Smith
Pat solutions
The Irish Times’ Pat Leahy is the
establishment’s favourite storyteller
P
at Leahy is from Clonmel, Co
Tipperary, and a member of the
Leahy family of Tubberadora
near Boherlahan. His father,
the historian and writer Seamus
Leahy (pronounced to rhyme with Fahy),
taught at Rockwell College from the 1960s
to 2000, and Pat graduated from Rockwell
in 1990. He studied law at UCD, where he
co-founded The University Observer with
clever comedian Dara Ó Briain in 1994, and
later became a Reuters Fellow at Oxford.
After an initiation in the Phoenix, Leahy
joined The Sunday Business Post in 1999,
becoming political editor and, in 2012,
deputy editor by which time Tipperary Live
was describing him as a “well known and
popular political pundit”. His bestselling
book ‘Showtime’ (2009) and his RTÉ
documentary Crisis: Inside the Cowen
Government (2011) cemented his ocial
voice. He later moved to The Irish Times,
eventually becoming its political editor
which he remains.
From the Phoenix to the
paper of reference
A 2016 profile published in Phoenix
magazine when he left The Sunday
Business Post for The Irish Times, described
a tense enough situation: Leahy’s irritation
after being passed over for editor in favour
of Ian Kehoe, his departure “leaving the
Post in the lurch” during an election,
and the displeasure of long-serving Irish
Times correspondents who saw him as
an interloper. The Irish Times had created
a new position — deputy political editor
— specifically to accommodate Leahy.
The senior position of political editor was
advertised but The Phoenix reported that
the decision to hire him had been made
in advance. It was, in eect, a coronation:
Leahy was the heir apparent in a newsroom
that had grown uneasy about its future
identity. Harry McGee, still 10 years later
‘pol corr’ was said to be “seething” having
expected to replace the serving political
editor, Stephen Collins.
The wider pattern:
documenting power, rarely
sceptical of it
Leahy has become Irish Times man. In
a Village article headlined ‘The Irish
Times suppresses the big stories’ (2021),
I catalogued the ways the paper buries
investigations into élite wrongdoing. Down
the years, these have become instincts
shared by Leahy.
Leahy’s books, ‘The Price of Power: Inside
Ireland’s Crisis Coalition’ and ‘Showtime:
The Inside Story of Fianna Fáil in Power’,
despite being labelled political exposés,
are also mainly celebrations of Irish
political colour. Politics, in his framing, is
an élite sport: he loves GAA metaphors and
revels in reporting politicians saying “fuck”.
For years he was close to PJ Mara who he
venerated; and latterly is said to have
benefited from the eye of now ascended
Paschal Donohoe.
In acres of insider narrative, much gets
sidelined: radical alternatives, morality,
ideas, policies. Time-serving doesn’t seem
to bother him that much.
Insider
It is ironic that Leahy’s first job had
been with the Phoenix magazine devoted
to pricking the egos, and exposing the
manoeuvres, of precisely the kinds of
people Leahy would later underpin. The
young reporter who once haunted the
fringes walked through the front door and
self-seriously now helps windbag (his own
term to be fair) the inner life of the State.
Realo
Leahy often adopts the voice of a weary
but sensible adviser, urging politicians
to “get real”. His tone, in print as on-air
— calm, authoritative, prim, alive to irony
— is the very mechanism through which
establishment thinking is laundered into
common sense. Pat Leahy is meticulous,
cynical of doctrine, including party
doctrine, yet also deferential with a law
degree reinforcing that rather than inspiring
promotion of theories of law or rights in
particular cases. His instinct is to defend
ministers and the governing process itself,
presenting his positions as “realism” rather
than ideology. Pat Leahy’s predecessor as
political editor, Stephen Collins believes in
a political project; Europe, ideological right-
of-centrism; Leahy more or less believes in
the authority of those who run the system,
most of whom share his hostility to ideas.
Pat Leahy and ideology
Some years ago Leahy told me that he was
a liberal. It was oered as a kind of quiet
credential: I am reasonable, I am balanced.
But anyone who reads him over time,
as Ireland’s political classes have been
obliged to, sees not the instincts of a
liberal but the outlook of a procedural
conservative with a worldview deeply
shaped by hierarchy, stability, managerial
thinking and the sensibilities of ocial
Ireland. While the paper’s formal editorial
line tends to be wary of executive overreach
and broadly sympathetic to rights-based
positions, Leahy’s analysis, and the
articles he presumably commissions from
his correspondents, are on the whole more
indulgent of ministers, more sceptical of
activists, more suspicious of dissent, less
sceptical of the market.
What Leahy chooses to
write about — and what he
chooses to ignore
In Leahy’s Spectatoresque universe,
structural inequality, class, community
suering, the real experiences of migrants,
renters or disabled people; of vulnerable
(or invulnerable) people — are sideshows.
This selective focus creates the impression
that power not policy is the natural centre of
gravity in political life.
POLITICS
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Pat solutions
A review of a decade of Leahy’s columns
reveals a striking concern for ministerial
strategy, Cabinet psychology, Spadology,
internal party manoeuvring, the anxieties
of senior ocials, the temperament
of leaders, the supposed burdens of
“delivery”; and above all for psephology,
polls. Leahy is of the school that excites to
cover government announcements a day
before they are publicly released. Though
he certainly seems worked up about
challenges to Micheál Martin’s leadership,
over the last year he has seemed over-
interested in the Haughey-FitzGerald era, a
strange focus on posterity for a man so little
concerned with what it might say about
current governments.
Leahy used his end-of-year space not to
plant some interesting new political idea
but to disinter forgotten Anglo-French
Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, in a piece
about how the politics editor, as well as his
readers, should go hunting and drinking
wine.
Sectoral perspectives
This magazine’s hostility to Leahy is
grounded largely in his insiderism leading
to a deference to power, but his ventilations
on existing policy are also mostly
antithetical to the favoured ideologies of
this magazine,
1. Housing: developer logic with a
moderate face
Leahy’s perspective on planning and
development is firmly shaped by the
worldview of the construction industry and
the Departments of Housing and Finance.
Along with many lobbyists from home
and abroad he has called repeatedly for
an “explosion” in house-building, decried
planning laws as obstructive, and warned of
a coming “decade of failure” unless supply
accelerates. His analysis leans heavily
on the assumption that NIMBYism and
planning protections are primary obstacles
to aordability.
Yet the data tell another story. Of
developers who won’t develop their
permissions, of collapsed social housing, of
investment funds squeezing out first-time
buyers and pushing up rents. But Leahy’s
columns never follow these facts into reality
or consider the role of ideology in policy:
“The real crisis is about [the government’s]
own capacities, its sense of direction, its
self-belief and its ability to address the
problems faced by the country”.
What he rarely acknowledges is the
structural reality: the commodification of
housing, the distortions of international
capital, the rise of institutional landlords,
and the chronic under-provision of public
housing. He doesn’t have the bandwidth
to contemplate a future of public housing
or plan-led development any more than
he does of universal public healthcare.
In Leahy’s telling, the villains of the
housing crisis are procedural: planning
appeals, consultations, judicial reviews,
environmental safeguards. His solution
is: “If the two parties want a roadmap for
delivery on housing and infrastructure,
they should look to John Collison’s essay
in the Irish Times [analysed on page 31 of
in this edition Village]” For Leahy, housing
like much else, is a problem of delivery, not
justice.
2. Inequality: a narrative built on shaky
ground
In late 2020, Leahy published a telltale Irish
Times column arguing that inequality in
Ireland was falling. It was a soothing story
— one the Government was immediately
eager to amplify. But Unite Trade Union
exposed the fragility of Leahy’s argument.
For example, Leahy drew “attention
to a quote from TASC’s 2020 report on
inequality: ‘while inequality was on the
rise elsewhere, it was falling here’. Yet, he
omits the very next sentence — indeed, the
immediate continuation — which casts a
shadow of doubt on this claim: “Another
explanation for Ireland’s stability is that
it is only apparent, and that inequality
has actually been increasing. The data
presented so far has ultimately been drawn
from surveys, which have well-known
limitations when it comes to the measure of
income, and hence inequality”.
Leahy relied overwhelmingly on the
Gini coecient, a narrow measure derived
from a voluntary survey of just over 4,000
households, many of whose responses
were provided “by proxy”. High earners
regularly decline to participate in such
surveys, and wealth inequality — the
real engine of structural division — is not
captured at all.
Unite pointed out that alternative
indicators, such as the income share of
the top 1%, show inequality rising, not
falling. They also noted that inequality
spans more than income: it includes
housing, healthcare, childcare, education,
and personal capacity. Leahy’s definition
collapsed all of these into disposable
income.
The consequences of this narrowness
were not academic. It allowed a national
newspaper to reassure its readers —
incorrectly, and on one of the issues of our
time — that inequality was shrinking. The
Irish Times found no space for Unite’s view.
3. Immigration: when the mask slips
Leahy’s treatment of immigration reveals
the illiberal undercurrents in his moderate
tone. In his ‘Making Enemies’ column
of November 2025, he praised Jim
O’Callaghan for “kicking the hornets’ nest”
of immigration reform. He reproduced —
approvingly — O’Callaghan’s claim that
Irish citizenship was “not a right but a
privilege” an endorsement the Irish Times
editorial board avoided. He has described
deportations as “largely symbolic but
important” when it is not at all clear
that they are important as opposed to…
symbolic.
His columns framed NGOs, migrants’
rights advocates and critics of the reforms
as emotional, naïve or overly sensitive.
He described onetime immigration
minister Roderic O’Gorman as “mugged
by reality” and simpered that unlike him
Jim O’Callaghan, a man of Leahy’s heart,
“never tweeted in Urdu”. The subtext was
unmistakable: the Government was bravely
doing, not for the first time, What the public
secretly wanted but could not say, and
critics simply did not understand the adult
business of governing.
This was not liberalism. It was the
managerial defence of a restrictive
migration politics.
4. Neutrality: the journalist as Top Gun
pilot
Perhaps the most striking example of
Leahy’s instinctive deference to executive
authority was his reaction to President
Michael D Higgins’ 2023 neutrality remarks.
Under the swaggering headline “Did
President Michael D Higgins cross a line
with his neutrality remarks? You bet he
did,” Leahy cast himself as a defender of
constitutional propriety against a rogue
president.
He argued that Higgins could criticise
austerity — because it was “European” —
but not neutrality, which he framed as a
purely national matter. The distinction was
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contrived but served a familiar function:
policing the boundaries of acceptable
dissent. Leahy and his colleague Conor
Gallagher warned of “consternation
among EU diplomats” and suggested
foreign states might exploit Higgins’
remarks for disinformation campaigns. It
was a performance of journalistic concern
that, in substance, aligned perfectly with
Government irritation.
The eect was unmistakable: a journalist
acting as the State’s air-cover.
5. The 2020 coalition: Leahy pushing for
coalition
During the 2020 coalition negotiations,
a sphere where he is most comfortable,
Leahy revealed a lot of his hand: almost
oerihg himself as adviser-in-print. He
warned the Greens their moment “won’t
last forever”, told them they needed
to accept “the world as it is”, insisting
members grasp coalition deals. He wrote:
“I can’t quite decide whether the Green
Party’s reluctance to enter government
stems from political opportunism or just a
lack of courage. Whichever it is, the party is
turning its back on an opportunity to bring
about a step change in climate policy and
wield unprecedented power at the centre of
government”.
He concluded that the three parties
“probably have to do a deal now and stick
with it”.
Leahy solidly embraced the Greens as a
force for the stability he reveres in the face
of more left-wing parties, though he has
never shown much interest in the Greens’
actual agenda, least of all any undersanding
that they failed to deliver his “step change”
in climate policy.
Given his hostility to change it is not
surprising he was appalled at the prospect
of an anti-establishment left-winger as
President: “Backing Connolly suggests Sinn
Féin were out of ideas”, he harrumphed in
September 2025.
Policy avoidance
Indeed he doesn’t have much of a head
for policy. He certainly rarely analyses
or expounds it. An early-January 2026
wishlist promoted not policy, but structural,
reform of government: the addition of a
list to the electoral system; reduction of
numbers of TDS and their better payment;
empowerment of ministers and making
compliance with fiscal guidelines binding
(though not any social or environmental
poiicies or targets).
Tending Right
It would be unfair to portray Leahy as right-
wing as his job does not allow for that,
but it is cautionary to observe he may be
gesturing in that direction, He has been
loth to see the possibilities Connolly’s
election open up for the left, and a piece in
January on the topic broke down to a lecture
on being more positive and ended up with
the following workaday musing: “But the
single biggest question for the course of
Irish politics this year – more important
than left-wing co-operation [is whether]
the river of corporation tax revenues
continue to flow” in 2026. In recent weeks
in addition to that staple of conservatives,
“the one thing you’ll never hear a politician
say...we can’t aord it” [31 January],Leahy
has this year too facilitated coverage of
the right-wing ‘IRL Forum’, and serially
featured Eddie Hobbs, perhaps presaging
more coverage for right and far-right parties
which his paper has typically, until now,
largely ignored.
A recent Leahy piece on the rights of trans
kids to be referred to by chosen pronouns
was tendentiously biased against the do-
good clvil-righters who drafted guidelines
for the IHREC on the matter. For example he
did not fully explore how equality law has
been applied in analogous discrimination
contexts and he didn’t subject the
Department of Educations’s position to the
same legal scrutiny he applied to the Irish
Council for Civli Liberties’.
Small-c conservatism can also be a gateway
drug to rightism. Village would be worried
for Leahy, in his accepted milieu, if these
insidious flirtations on the right side
become more regular.
Ubiquitous media presence
Leahy is a good public performer and a
stalwart on RTÉ and Newstalk. He often
appears on Irish Times political podcasts
where he is self-deprecating and wry, and
demonstrably retains the aection of his
colleagues. On social media, contrariwise,
his establishment modulations transmute
him into a primary target. Despite being
political editor of the country’s paper of
reference, his tweets routinely attract paltry
engagement: hostility and low-four-digit
view counts. Part of this is stylistic. Leahy
tweets as he writes: cautious, self-denying,
squeamish. Social media rewards emotion.
His tweets read like internal archepiscopal
memos accidentally issued to the diocese.
Another part is demographic. His natural
audience — civil servants, lobbyists, senior
politicians, policy analysts, older Irish
Times readers, pub bores and incipient
right-wingers — are not prolific engagers
online. Leahy’s authority is institutional,
not popular. The state reads him. Twitter
does not. That’s not so bad.
Conclusion: the insider who
explains power to itself
Pat Leahy may indeed be a liberal. Fintan
O’Toole has described the Irish Times as
liberal. But in his polemical 2008 book ‘The
Irish Times: Past and Present’ John Martin
denied its liberal credentials asserting that,
even in the 1980s the Irish Times “followed
rather than led its largely middle-class
readership”. For reference I note that its
most important editor of the last 40 years
Conor Brady described himself as “slightly
left of centre” on political and social matters
but “somewhere right of centre in economic
matters” but Pat Leahy’s politics are very
dierent to those of O’Toole, Brady or the
way the Irish Times has seen itself. Leahy’s
political editorship reveals, if not ideology,
a consistent sub-ideological non-liberal
substrate. He is structurally aligned with
executive authority, sceptical of dissent,
impatient with rights-based critiques, allergic
to left-wing activism and wokery and now
tending right.
He is not a critic of power; he is its narrator. He
is the quiet conscience of ocial Ireland.
Did President
Michael D
Higgins cross
a line with
his neutrality
remarks? You
bet he did
archepiscopal on X
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