Is it likely that Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar occasionally talk about some of the glaring flaws in our health service? Like his father before him, the Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader is a qualified doctor. He wears that stripe lightly. The leader of Fianna Fáil, meanwhile, clocked up four years as Minister for Health from 2000-2004. Soon after he began his most recent stint as Taoiseach in 2021, Martin announced the coalition government’s Shared Island initiative. It involved ring-fencing €500 million of exchequer funds for spending on North/South collaborative projects during the 2021/2025 period. The language used to describe…

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