Simon Harris poised to become taoiseach

Mr Harris was born in 1986 and grew up in the coastal town of Greystones in County Wicklow and is a year younger than Mr Vardadkar was when he became taoiseach in 2017.

He is the eldest of three children, the son of a taxi driver and a special needs assistant.

His younger brother Adam is autistic – a fact which Mr Harris said kickstarted his own involvement in politics when he was 16.

As a schoolboy, Mr Harris attended St David’s Holy Faith Secondary School in Greystones before beginning a degree in journalism and French at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

However, the future minister for further and higher education dropped out of college during the penultimate year of his four-year degree course to pursue politics.

He was first elected as a councillor in 2009 and entered the Dáil in 2011 at the age of 24 – making him the youngest TD in chamber at the time.

He has had a rapid rise through the party ranks, landing his first cabinet role, as health minister in 2016.

The following summer Mr Harris married his long-term girlfriend, children’s cardiac nurse Caoimhe Wade.

His brother Adam was best man at the ceremony.

Mr Harris is now father to two children.

As minister for health, he oversaw the republic’s vote to overturn its abortion ban and the country’s cervical cancer screening scandal.

He was also in charge of the initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic, before being replaced when the new coalition government formed in 2020.

Since then Mr Harris has been minister for further and higher education, research, innovation and science, and briefly took on the justice portfolio.

He lives in Wicklow with his young family.

In an opinion piece to mark Father’s Day in 2022 he said parenthood was “the most important job I have, and ever will have”.

However, commentators have noted Mr Harris has made no secret of his political ambitions and he was widely tipped as a frontrunner soon after it emerged the job of taoiseach was up for grabs.