Senators unimpressed by Enda’s appearance

It is never easy trying to put a bad marriage back together — especially when one half of it has so recently tried to kill the other.

After the electorate refused to grant Enda Kenny’s death wish divorce from the Seanad, there he was yesterday, tail between his legs, begging the upper house to forgive him and patch things up between them.

Grinning, with both thumbs cheekily aloft, Mr Kenny told his frosty audience: “I come in peace, not war.”

After insisting he wanted to “move on” from all the recent unpleasantness in their relationship, Mr Kenny then attempted to proposition the senators.

But his proposals to try and breathe some new life into the unhappy political marriage between the two houses of the Oireachtas were not getting the senators excited.

The Seanad must have winced at the drive-by patronisation from the referendum reject before them as Mr Kenny insisted he was allowing the upper house an “opportunity to speak your mind”, before warning them he would not put up with any “bombastic triumphalism” if they did.

Not surprisingly, after such a clumsy political pass, Fianna Fáil leader Darragh O’Brien was not going to let the Taoiseach off the hook so lightly.

Mr O’Brien said he would not “dwell” on the recent referendum before proceeding to dwell on it as much as he could in the time allotted to him.

While scorning Mr Kenny’s “treatment” of the upper house in the past, Mr O’Brien made it clear he was prepared to be a constructive “partner” from now on.

And, like a partner who has felt neglected for far too long, his parting shot to the Taoiseach was: “I hope we will see you here more regularly from now on.”

Barely a third of the 60 senators had managed to make it to the chamber for the start of the session. Maybe they had forgotten where it was, which is curious because during the referendum campaign they kept insisting it was slap bang at the heart of democracy.

The reality would be that, after decades of constitutional bypass surgery, the nearest it is allowed to the pumping heart of power is the artery of irrelevance.

Enda claims he wants to mend that broken heart, but the senators he tried to bump off are not buying it.

They knew the Taoiseach was just paying lip-service to the Seanad for the sake of public appearances before he slipped back into the embrace of his one true love, that uppity lower house floozie, the Dáil, down the hall.