Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has taken advantage of an official visit in Washington with vice president Mike Pence to tell the socially conservative politician that he is proud to live in a time when his “political actions” are the metric by which he is judged, not his sexual orientation.

The comment – made during a trip where Mr Varadkar was accompanied by his partner, Matt Barrett – comes after a conversation between the two last year in which Mr Varadkar raised LGBT+ rights and equality issues with the Republican.

Mr Varadkar, Ireland‘s first openly gay prime minister, told Mr Pence on Thursday that American politics had inspired him as a child to do good because “that is what politics is all about”.

“It helped inspire me to run for office,” he said. “I also knew at the time that I lived in a country where if I tried to be myself, at the time I would have ended up breaking laws.”

He continued: “But today that has all changed. I stand here as a leader of my country, flawed and human, where I am judged by my political actions and not my sexual orientation, my skin tone, gender, or religious beliefs.”

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While Mr Varadkar told reporters before the meeting that the ties between the US and Ireland are strong, the pointed message on gay rights and equality highlights stark differences between the administrations in Washington and Dublin.

Mr Pence has long held socially conservative opinions, and has been a critic of LGBT+ rights and pursued policies that critics say were hurtful to the gay community during his time serving as governor of Indiana.

His reputation among the LGBT+ community has been so fraught that it once led the president of the Human Rights Campaign to call Mr Pence “the face of anti-LGBTQ hate in America”.

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During his time in public life, Mr Pence has argued against equality in the United States, saying during his congressional campaign in 2000, for instance, that “congress should oppose any effort to put gay and lesbian relationships on an equal legal status with heterosexual marriage”.

And, during his time in congress, Mr Pence pushed to make a bill that would withhold federal dollars from organisations that “celebrate” and “encourage” behaviour that leads to the spread of HIV. In doing so, Mr Pence also pushed for legislation that would only give money to institutions that helped gay individuals if they were interested in changing their sexual orientation.