Enjoy the ball Enda ... but watch out for Ugly Sisters

ENDA Kenny swept into the Burlington Hotel’s glittering ballroom as Taoiseach-in-waiting — and no one had ever been waiting for such validation for so long.

Mr Kenny had a throng of photographers and camera crews swirling around him — Enda’s time had finally arrived.

Fine Gaelers cheered wildly at the spectacle, knowing it heralded what the party had not tasted for 29 long, bitter, years — victory.

In the time of madness, the sumptuous Ballsbridge hotel was notorious as one of the high temples to the excesses of the boom.

But Earnest Enda was here to finally read the last rites over the Burlington Bertie era which had brought the nation to the edge of financial collapse.

“Thank you Dublin! Thank you Ireland!” Enda roared in the manner of a visiting rock star at the end of a speech which had been far more humble than triumphal.

“I will lead a government of responsibility not privilege. A government of public duty not personal entitlement. A government looking with confidence and courage to the future, not with guilt and regret at the past,” he announced, thankfully avoiding any cringe-making repeat of his earlier “Paddy likes to know what the story is” promise never to lie to the country.

Many in the room had tears in their eyes at the poignancy of the moment — so too did Eamon Ryan, but for different reasons.

The former energy minister now turfed-out as a TD as well, looked drained of life, flanking John Gormley outside the RDS count centre as the Green leader stopped just short of doing a McDowell a few metres from where the overly dramatic PD chief quit on the spot in 2007 and in so doing effectively signed his party’s political suicide note.

Mr Gormley insisted the Greens would weather the Dáil wipeout. Next to him, Mr Ryan’s already red eyes looked ready to fill with tears again.

The Horse Show House pub across the road from the RDS had by now become the repository for hopes, fears and sorrows as the long evening wore on and the tallies took their toll.

Now just another discarded ex-deputy, Sean Haughey, surrounded by clan members — some of whom looked strikingly, and somewhat alarmingly, like Charlie reborn — huddled at the front of the tight, narrow, bar while a phalanx of worried Labourites squeezed into the middle, and a smattering of Blueshirts occupied the rear, refusing to surrender the dream of majority rule just yet.

The Haugheys looked despondent and in shock — a dynasty broken amidst the rubble of a smashed party. A turbulent and extraordinary political journey finally over.

Anxiety rolled back and forth through the Labour supporters, senior figures like Joan Burton were unable to gauge if they would be walking into cabinet, or making the sullen shuffle back to the opposition benches as Fine Gael high command insisted it could still hit 80 seats and throw its lot in with the independents.

Back across the street, fallen Fianna Fáil cabinet minister Pat Carey wandered around the RDS as if emerging from a train crash wreckage, seemingly unable to comprehend the scale of voter revenge meted out to the once dominant party in the state which now lingers in a political twilight zone unsure if it will follow the Irish Parliamentary Party into oblivion, or Mr Kenny’s Fine Gael into rebirth and renewed relevance.

But the omens did not look good for Micheál Martin — shorn of almost half a million first preference votes and with much of whatever talent remained in the parliamentary party democratically decapitated.

Mr Martin now has barely enough TDs to form a shadow cabinet, no women at all, and — oh, the irony — the only deputy left in Dublin, Brian Lenihan, the finance chief of the hated old regime and a man who continues to nurse simmering leadership ambitions of his own.

After a decade deriding Enda, the final humiliation for Fianna Fáil is that they must now look to him as their role model for re- building a broken party and turning it into a winning machine once again. Mr Kenny is suddenly political master of all he surveys.

After so many years left waiting as the Cinderella of Irish politics, Enda finally got to go to the ball at the Burlington.

But he should savour the moment while he can, because it will not be long until the Ugly Sisters — Labour from without, and the thrusting young Thatcherites from within Fine Gael — try to ruin his fairytale ending.