50 Enda Kenny
The problem with Enda Kenny was that he came to the leadership of Fine Gael because nobody else really wanted it as much as he did. There had been a desultory contest with four candidates, but Kenny had emerged victorious from the secret ballot on account of being the most affable and best organized of the contenders. As a former chief whip, he was well known to all members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party and was more popular than the others. He had been an unsuccessful candidate just eighteen months before, when Michael Noonan defeated him.
The party had ‘lost’ three leaders in the previous decade or so – first Alan Dukes, then John Bruton and finally Noonan, a cartoonish figure from Limerick who had been made famous in Dermot Morgan’s depiction in the weekly radio satirical show, Scrap Saturday. In the case of each of the three previous leaders, there had been a clear sense of entitlement. From the late 1970s, it had been clear that either Dukes or Bruton was destined to become the successor to Garret FitzGerald, so each took his turn and was dispatched following poor election results. Dukes and Bruton were both removed by internal coups, while Noonan stepped down before the same fate could befall him.
Kenny was to become a kind of default leader, having been elected after the party had lost the will to live. He had been a moderately impressive trade and tourism minister in John Bruton’s Rainbow cabinet. Everyone liked him. He was good fun, smart and idealistic in a commonsense kind of way. But nobody thought of him as leadership material until he suddenly got the idea into his head. There were suggestions that his wife, Fionnuala O’Kelly, who had been a Fianna Fáil press officer under Charles Haughey, and had crossed the tribal line to marry the young former teacher from Mayo, had implanted the notion.
From the party’s perspective, the choice of Kenny as leader was motivated by a desire, at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity, to clone the ‘Bertie factor’ by choosing someone with a high affability quotient to compete with Bertie Ahern for the feel-good sentiment that, as the third millennium stretched its feet under the table, seemed destined to last forever.
For years, Enda Kenny had been a boon companion to political cronies and journalists in the network of pubs in the vicinity of Leinster House. As a party piece, he would deliver from the political of speeches by John F. Kennedy, in a convincing imitation of the original. He was funny, decent, likeable and thoughtful.
As a political organizer and backslapper, he had few equals. In the early years of his leadership, he did amazing work, scraping Fine Gael off the floor and putting it back into contention. At a grassroots level he was liked and respected, mainly because he had no airs or graces about him. But as the potential next Chieftain of the Irish People, Kenny was beset by a problem: he did not seem to believe it either plausible or conceivable that he had stepped into the shoes of the Cosgraves and Garret FitzGerald. He seemed to want the job more than anyone had ever wanted it, and yet to have this almost childlike air of hesitancy that grew as the prospect of his elevation drew closer.
A ‘difficulty communicating’ was the favoured euphemism to describe this condition. In a sense it was accurate. Enda’s key communication weakness was something like the response of the dyslexic who, terrified of a big word, glimpses further up the line, panics and gets stuck on the simple word in front of him. Awareness of this deficiency had caused him to fall back on rehearsed scripting and studied mannerisms. Seeming to lack the confidence to claim the authority of leadership, he had been acting out the role.
Early on in his leadership of Fine Gael, some newspapers tried to label him a racist on account of a joke he had told at a party gathering. There was much huffing and puffing about whether, ‘in a multicultural society’, Kenny could be a suitable Taoiseach. In fact, all that had happened was that the old Enda had briefly resurfaced in what he imagined might be a safe environment. He had used the word ‘nigger’ in a story about being on a junket to some African country some years before, when a black barman had used the word. It was not a good joke, but only an idiot would have adduced it as evidence that Enda was a racist.
It was after this that the iron seemed to enter his soul. He would not tell any more stories or make any more jokes. He would not be himself, because that was too dangerous. As party leader, he became ponderous and heavy-handed. He acquired from someplace a deep, mellifluous voice, full of sound and fury. He began to use his hands in a statesmanlike way and generally tried to project himself as a serious phenomenon. He seemed to reach deep into himself to find unplumbed depths of pomposity before delivering himself of an opinion, a witticism or a condemnation. Nobody could take it seriously. He became the butt of routines by every two-bit comedian in the land. They called him ‘Inda’, ‘the ginger whinger’ or ‘the stiff with the quiff’.
Mostly, it was unfair. In person, Kenny is different from his media persona: the hammyness evaporates and he becomes measured and almost understated. Anyone who has encountered him at any length knows him to be an immensely thoughtful man with a host of good ideas about how Irish society should function. That this has long failed to come across is due in part to his personality, which has an element of shyness, and in part to the way he has been persuaded to present himself by those advising him about ‘media skills’. Under the influence of makeover artists and spin-merchants, he had been turned into a sub-Bertie affable acrobat, throwing shapes and mimes. It was as if someone had impressed upon him the necessity to look statesmanlike at all times, persuading him to utter, in a low, slow manner, clunking observations that might otherwise have reduced someone of his intelligence to paroxysms of laughter.
The result was this odd self-caricature, who made exaggerated rhetorical interjections in the style of the múinteoir scoile playing a parish priest in an amateur dramatics production of a play written by the local garda sergeant.
Had Enda come announced as a Fianna Fáiler, he would probably have got away with it. He had that added quality of gregariousness you associated with Soldiers of Destiny and did the backslapping thing at least as well as the best among the old enemy. During an attempted coup within Fine Gael in the summer of 2010, Kenny’s stalwart band of loyalists successfully put about the suggestion that the rebels were a bunch of prissy cappuccino drinkers, whereas Kenny’s people were racy of the soil and ate their dinners in the middle of the day. Kenny survived, going on to become Taoiseach within the year.
He was elected on what might have been taken for a wave of popular acclamation but was really the exhausted spirit of a defeated people recognizing that Enda possessed, at least, a passion that nobody else seemed capable of summoning. For so long it had seemed implausible that Enda might be turned to in this way, and yet, when it happened, it was accompanied by an electoral embrace that had about it more than a little affection. Finally, Enda was delivered to the Taoiseach’s office with a tenderness and goodwill that seemed to reflect his own vulnerability. He was our last option and we wished him well, but deep down we all knew that he could only surprise us.
Kenny’s primary problem remains that the qualities that enabled him to survive as leader of his own party are precisely those that militate against him on the broader stage. He is outside mainstream Irish society, looking in rather than comfortably sitting within the changed and still changing Ireland and speaking on its behalf. He is the product of smoke-filled party backrooms rather than the street sensibility of a country in which everything clicks a hundred times snappier than when he entered politics on his father’s death in 1975.
It would be remiss not to note that the outcome of the election indicated a tentativeness also on the part of the voters – to be interpreted, perhaps, as a withholding of total confidence in Enda. An obvious interpretation of the ebb and flow of the election campaign was that, having briefly contemplated giving Enda an unequivocal nod, the people pulled back at the last to ensure Labour would ride shotgun. Another reading is that we never had any real choice anyway: Enda’s destiny and his people’s seemed to have been intertwined from way back. We were down to our last option, the one we might have given least consideration to had there been any realistic alternatives.
On the face of things, Enda was too much like the rest of his countrymen not to render it inevitable that he would feck things up. But you never knew. Since, for a long time, we have sought to place our faith in people we thought of as slightly better than ourselves, perhaps we have nothing to lose by trying out a man who is no better or worse than most of us.