Just who is the alternative taoiseach?
ENDA KENNY smiles at the suggestion he may soon be waking up with a knife in his back.
The good humour bodes well for a man who has seen four of his fellow Dáil party leaders topple in the space of little more than a year.
Not to mention the fact that Fine Gael is itself hardly above regicide when the king is believed to have lost his way to the electoral throne room, as Alan Dukes will testify.
However, Mr Kenny sees no night of the long knives approaching.
“Thanks be to God I have good health and am very fresh and able to deal with all these things,” he laughs.
There are, however, hints of darker currents raging beneath the placid surface of the Fine Gael waters.
“It’s not all lovey-dovey and nice and friendly. Politics is about people and about life and reality and I understand that, and anyone in this party who has a problem is quite entitled to come and discuss that problem with the leader face-to-face.
“And I would say this, there are very few leaders of political parties who have had such a direct, hands-on approach with the members as I have had in terms of any difficulties or concerns or anxieties they might have and that will continue for the future,” he says.
For all the outward confidence, the message could well be interpreted along the lines of Harold Wilson’s warning to a restless and impatient British Labour Party: “I know what’s going on — I’m going on.”
Tellingly, Mr Kenny is deft enough to avoid naming any individual member of his thrusting front bench as a natural, eventual, successor.
Fine Gael is so suffused with talent it would be impossible to make such a call, insists Mr Kenny as he enthuses about the “ambition” of his colleagues. No doubt aware it is that very “ambition” he also needs to keep a very wary eye on as his Dáil performances against the parliamentary presence of Brian Cowen throw his abilities as alternative taoiseach into sharper relief than when battling the gentler Bertie Ahern.
As always the search for the inner Enda proves somewhat elusive.
On paper he should be the alpha male of Mayo — an ex-county football star who conquers mountains in his spare time.
Yet, is he not concerned that a large and persistent strain of voters believe he just does not have enough grit to be taoiseach? “We have done well in election after election. It all comes down on the party leader, we missed government by a whisker — by a whisker.
“As an opposition leader I don’t have the resources or spin opportunities to reach people like a taoiseach does, so you have to touch people in a different way. I’m going to do my own thing in the time ahead and I look forward to it,” Mr Kenny says, avoiding confronting those poll findings that say voters don’t think he is made of taoiseach timbre.
However, this view of the need for a towering taoiseach over-imagines the real nature of the office.
It would matter if the Republic was a nuclear superpower facing down the resurgent imperialist ambitions of Vladimir Putin, but in reality, the taoiseach merely shuffles around in the limited policy zone not already ceded to the European Central Bank, social partnership and the Supreme Court.
Mr Kenny comes across as a genuine and affable man, and it would be hard to imagine him someday squirming in the dock at Dublin Castle as the past comes bearing down on him.
Maybe if everyone in the country could have a meal with Mr Kenny, they might re-evaluate their reservations about him — Daniel O’Donnell with an economic policy — but that is not going to happen.
However, some timbre may have been called for in the past few weeks as solo runs by two front-benchers into the sensitive area of immigration left the party looking confused and chaotic.
Brian Hayes had to issue an abject apology for letting the deliberately loaded term “segregation” undermine a perfectly sensible plea for pupils with poor English to receive immersion language lessons, and enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar was branded “racist” by Mary Hanafin for an off-the-cuff call for jobless migrants to be paid to return to their country of origin.
Do not the two incidents show the shadow cabinet needs the smack of firm government from Mr Kenny?
“I’m not in any way dictatorial. I do not look over the shoulders of my members when they speak, that is not who we are. If we cannot speak openly and rationally about all these things then we fail ourselves. The way Fianna Fáil have tried to brand us racist is pitiful,” he states.
Mr Kenny is all too aware Fine Gael is now the wrong side of the rainbow as former poll partners Labour leave the way open for a post-election deal with FF.
“Eamon Gilmore is his own man here. It’s his business as to where he wants to take the party,” Mr Kenny states briskly, noting sharply a Labour deal with Sinn Féin in the Senate vote not only denied FG a seat, but “sanitised Sinn Féin to an extent”.
To an extent where he could go into Government with them next time?
“I ruled them out before the last election and I am not going to give any predictions about where we go from here,” he responds ambiguously.
Mr Kenny says he is counting down to the next election he insists is “147 weeks away” — which either means he knows something we do not, or he’s counting down to the wrong election as the current Dáil has some 197 weeks’ life left in it.
Let’s hope he’s keeping better count of any missing knives from the shadow cabinet cutlery drawer.
