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Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shots.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Ben Scallin,

senior political correspondent of ripped Media and based in Dublin.

Ben, we're talking on the week that Leavradka has announced that he is resigning,

both as the leader of his party and as the T-Sock.

What were the main factors here?

Because in his statement, which I think we can listen to now,

he talked about the personal and the political reasons.

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of factors at play.

Many people listening will possibly be familiar with a recent referendum or pair of referendums

that Ireland had just a couple of weeks ago where the government's position was

catastrophicly rejected to the tune of about 70% by the Irish public which was a big upset because they don't typically lose

referendums on social issues.

And so that really was a very unexpected result, even for opponents, I think, many people thought all the government always gets their way on these things

and they thought that it would sail through comfortably and so I don't I wouldn't attribute that

solely to Veradker's resignation but I think that that may have been sort of a killing blow or the nail in the coffin as it

were that led to the timing of him deciding to step down now as opposed to at some other stage because the pressure on the government has been mounting for a couple of years now at this stage on a whole variety of highly contentious issues and that really was just a final straw that broke the

Campbell's back that I just don't think they they can come back from

...