Kenny shows he’s on the ball
It wasn’t really what Enda Kenny wanted to hear on the drizzle-splattered streets of Newbridge, Kildare, yesterday, but the grumpy – and slightly damp looking – old man berating him had gone straight for the jugular and pinpointed a lingering national doubt that has dogged the leader of the opposition for seven long years.
With his trademark smile and ginger step, Mr Kenny brushed aside the negativity and simply got on with the job at hand, undaunted by the attack he has heard so many time before.
Just as George Bush Snr famously struggled with the “vision thing” when voters failed to see any inspirational or ideological point to his career, Mr Kenny has similarly been dragged down by the “gravitas thing” as many have wondered whether he has the mettle to be Taoiseach.
However, there seems to have been a shift in attitudes with the nation taking a definitive value judgement on the alternate Taoiseach and deciding that while he is certainly no Barack Obama, he does have a strong team around him and could manage the top job – a grudging acceptance among disillusioned voters that if the price for change is taking a gamble on him, they are prepared to pay it.
While his satisfaction ratings are still dwarfed by those for his party and fellow opposition leader Eamon Gilmore, they have started to inch up and the strong, snobbish Dublin derision against him which was so redolent in the Bertie era has been dissipated by the raw rurality of Brian Cowen.
And for a man so often branded a loser, he has a habit of doing rather well at the polls, besting Fianna Fáil at the Euro contest last time out after resurrecting and resuscitating the empty husk of a political party Fine Gael was reduced to after the disaster of Michael Noonan in 2002, and making more than 20 gains at the last general election.
Of course, that battle also highlighted his weaknesses, the clumsy, poorly prepared for appearance in the leader’s debate, and an inability to command the detail of economic management which allowed Fianna Fáil to rubbish the Rainbow’s tax plans in the final days of the campaign and thus snatch victory.
Mr Kenny’s reputation for lacking the killer instinct, so essential for power, was also highlighted by the strategic blunder he made when the Bertiegate scandal first erupted. Mr Kenny went in just hard enough to see public sympathy flow to the then Taoiseach as Fianna Fáil wrapped the whole tawdry business up under the blanket of “personal sorrow”. But Mr Kenny did not, or rather could not, follow through and go in for the kill – leaving him in the worst of both worlds.
Paradoxically for a man who comes across so wooden and stiff on TV, Mr Kenny comes alive campaigning, revelling in the personal contact as voters, almost always, return his warmness.
Perched atop a plastic cooler box, he almost bursts the loud hailer speakers as he rallies the Fine Gael troops for the Newbridge canvass:
“Let’s run down this street! Let’s meet the people! For, by God, we have a great story to tell them!”
With that he was off, darting around the road like a political pinball, zeroing-in on anyone in his path.
And then, after the three second chats about parking zones and the need for better bins, the trauma of Irish society’s gaping psychological wound – institutionalised child abuse – was suddenly there as a woman broke down in tears recounting her own story of horror. Mr Kenny looked visibly moved after the unexpected encounter.
Then he recomposed himself and hurtled back into the election fray.
The two women in Dunnes who described themselves as ex-FF voters, pressed him hard on the economy by the five items or less express checkout. A lengthy reply lambasting the National Assets Management Agency seemed to leave them a bit lost, but after he had moved on to the next punter, the pair appeared suitably impressed: “He’s genuine and honest, he certainly doesn’t come across as arrogant like Brian Cowen does. I’m going to give him a chance next time.”
Unlike Mssrs Cowan and Gilmore, who always look like they are going through the motions when flesh pressing, Mr Kenny gets carried away with the sheer thrill of meeting new people and seeing new things – as in Dunnes when he passes a display with a big sign sticking out of it reading “Apple pies €1.99” and just can’t stop himself exclaiming to an empty supermarket aisle: “Apple pies! €1.99!”
It’s at this stage that struggling euro candidate JP Phelan starts to get a little concerned and muses: “It must be a surprise for the shoppers. One second they’re in their trolleys, then the next second Enda Kenny’s head is beside them.”
The soft drizzle had turned decidedly darker as he returned to the street which had been left a voter-free zone by the downpour.
The hard rain of economic collapse also seems to have helped sweep away much of the lingering national doubt about Mr Kenny’s ability to govern.
