Enda passes stress tests — by default

The Taoiseach looked like Bambi in the headlights, as he struggled to deal with the fallout from the Moriarty report, writes Political Correspondent Shaun Connolly

STRESS tests dominated Enda Kenny’s agenda at home and abroad as he battled to prevent his political currency being hit by an early devaluation.

The first test of how the new Taoiseach deals with stress erupted when the 2,348-page Moriarty report smashed down on the Oireachtas as if from nowhere.

Despite waiting 14 years for it to materialise, the tome’s arrival appeared to catch everyone by surprise.

Enda looked as startled as Bambi in the headlights as he strained every sinew not to say the wrong thing while stone-walling like a Connemara farm hand in the Dáil as the opposition bombarded him with questions regarding the report.

As it dawned on the Fianna Fáil benches that a major political-financial scandal had just erupted and their party was not at the centre of it for once, Micheál Martin’s now very merry men could hardly contain their inner glee. Indeed, Billy Kelleher and Timmy Dooley barracked poor Bambi, sorry Enda, so much it looked like they were ready to channel their outer Glee as well and burst into a spontaneous song and dance routine right there in the chamber.

It was a rude awakening after the champagne and shamrock sojourn to the White House, and it left Kenny playing catch-up all week.

As O’Brien proclaimed his innocence with such fierceness it looked as if he’d plugged himself into the national grid, Lowry held court in his hotel bedroom, inviting in journalists to hear his own howls of outrage. All the while Justice Moriarty kept a dignified silence as he was disgracefully vilified, letting his report speak for itself.

And it contained many talking points, such as The Complexity of The Three Transactions, a strange process whereby some £900,000 in monies and secured loans went to Lowry from O’Brien, or with help from him.

Like the Three Secrets of Fatima, The Complexity of the Three Transactions elicited much fascination and wonder.

Both men insist it is all perfectly innocent. Mr Justice Moriarty found it to be “a clandestine system to confer payments.”

And just as God moves in a mysterious way, so did many amounts of money in this rather unpleasant saga.

Such as the $50,000 that burned an embarrassing hole in Fine Gael’s sweaty little hands when the Esat contract victors channelled it to the party just two months after the licence was awarded.

Leo Varadkar, who in the time it has taken to conduct the Moriarty Tribunal, has developed from awkward teenager to awkward Transport Minister, admitted the party did not come out of the affair “smelling of roses”.

A nice understatement, but one which still left our dynamic new Taoiseach initially less forthcoming regarding that difficult-to-explain dollar donation.

In fact, Kenny always seemed some 24 hours behind the curve, but when he caught up with the action he did so decisively — well, sort of.

A day after Moriarty’s denunciation of the way the donation had been handled as “secretive, utterly lacking in transparency, and designed to conceal the fact of such payment, by or on behalf of the donors,” Kenny admitted the $50,000 acceptance was “wrong” and he regretted the “circuitous route” it had taken to be returned back.

Indeed, explorers circumnavigating the globe have taken less gruelling trajectories than that battered cheque did — but at least it got to cool its heels while “resting” in an off-shore account along the way.

Then another full day after Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore called for Lowry to quit the Dáil, Kenny reached the same conclusion — well, sort off.

When asked if the Tipperary North Independent should go, the Taoiseach enigmatically mused: “In an ideal world, yes, but we don’t live in an ideal world.”

Which is an answer so tepid that perhaps if voters were asked if someone else should be Taoiseach other than Kenny, a majority might respond: “In an ideal world, yes, but we don’t live in an ideal world.”

But no-one was mincing their words down in Lowry-land when the disgraced deputy retreated to Thurles to surround himself with the faithful.

When one journalist pointed out to a Lowry supporter that the Tribunal report found the ex-minister had aided O’Brien, he was met with the curt reply: “If you keep on annoying me, I’ll pick you up by the legs and fuck you off that wall there, and I mean that.”

Still, it’s a startling sight to see Fianna Fáil scramble for the moral high ground of political probity.

Two further blasts from the past sent a shudder down the national spine when John Gormley and Ivor Callely tried to set the record straight and merely ended up making even bigger fools of themselves in the process.

The Green leader revealed he thought the IMF would be barging into Ireland from last summer.

This is an incredible act of foresight from the man who, literally, slept his way through the bank guarantee crisis night when he could not be roused from his bed, and then sleep-walked through the next two and a half years of disaster that that act of financial folly collapsed the nation into.

Someone who can never keep quiet is Callely, who turned the final day of the Seanad into his own personal car crash as he continued to speak in an empty chamber shut down in a vain attempt to shut him up.

Callely smarted he had become a figure of “ridicule” — oh, Ivor, if only you could laugh at yourself, then you wouldn’t be missing out on one of the biggest jokes in the Oireachtas.

Mr Kenny’s much trumpeted EU showdown was blown-off course by the collapse of Portugal’s economy.

We finally have another bail-out buddy along with Greece — safety in numbers. The banking stress test is almost upon us, but it looks as if Enda will pass it — if only by default.