“What I stand for above all is the view that the Government is there not to run peoples’ lives, but to help people to lead better lives,” the man poised to become the next Taoiseach said.

“I particularly want to focus the work of the Government in the next couple of years on rewarding work, rewarding enterprise and ensuring that people can run their businesses well and their farms well and that they can keep more of the money that they earn.”

There’s no way that those parts of the country can really fully participate in recovery if they’re not connected in terms of roads and broadband

While he disagreed with the idea of a rural-urban divide, arguing that cities had problems too, he acknowledged that the Irish countryside had specific issues, including the poor state of the road and telecommunications networks.

“There’s no way that those parts of the country can really fully participate in recovery if they’re not connected in terms of roads and broadband,” he said.

On climate change, Minister Varadkar warned against imposing constraints on Irish farmers that would lead to the food they would have produced being displaced by food produced in countries where agriculture is actually more greenhouse gas-intensive.

“I think we should stick to our targets for food production and the focus in terms of getting our emissions down should be from the other areas, in particular energy and transport,” he said.

Listen to Leo Varadkar’s views on agriculture and climate change in our podcast below:

Listen to "Leo Varadkar shares his thoughts on climate change" on Spreaker.

Read the full interview here and in the current print edition of the Irish Farmers Journal.

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