Enda Kenny and top aides face party grilling

Taoiseach Enda Kenny is to face the wrath of his vastly- reduced parliamentary party meeting today, in a bid to save his leadership.

Mr Kenny and his top aides are to be roasted over their botched handling of the party’s campaign, which has seen them lose almost 18 seats.

Mark Mortell, the party’s strategist, last night said he expects he and other top Fine Gael strategists will get “unreasonable and unwarranted criticism” for their handling of the campaign.

Mr Mortell, was widely-lauded for Fine Gael’s record victory in 2011.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Mr Mortell said he wasn’t that concerned whether he was being scapegoated for the party’s poor performance.

“I have been around politics a long time and you learn to take the rough with the smooth,” he said. “When you win everyone’s a winner and when it goes wrong people seek to pick out someone to be the bad guy”.

He added: “The campaign outcome was not what we expected or hoped for. People had made their mind up on things that weren’t coming in the polls.

“We probably got unreasonable and unwarranted praise last time around and we will get unreasonable and unwarranted criticism this time,” he said.

The party’s messaging and main campaign slogan is to be hotly-debated as many TDs have said they felt their concerns about the campaign pitch were being ignored.

It has emerged that several top ministers, including Frances Fitzgerald, Paschal Donohoe, James Reilly and Simon Harris expressed concerns about the Fine Gael election package, which they said was aloof and not “punter friendly”.

Donohoe and Fitzgerald are believed to have pushed for the party to soften its message to ensure it was talking to as broad an audience as possible.

Mr Kenny and the performance of key election advisers, MEP Brian Hayes and Mr Mortell, will be scrutinised by livid TDs who are “very raw”.

Several TDs last night said they were still “shell-shocked” at the scale of the loss of seats in last Friday’s election.

But, as bad as the campaign was, several complained that the party has not handled the fall-out of the campaign well at all.

“The campaign was shite, but we are also having a bad week. Enda is seen as a lame duck but if he beats Micheál next Thursday, I don’t see how he doesn’t stay on,” one TD said.

Some ministers have complained that throughout the campaign, they were effectively sidelined by bosses.

But as verbalised by Frank Flannery, the party’s former director of elections, there has also been criticisms of several top ministers for going missing in the campaign.

Heavy hitters such as Fitzgerald, Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney failed to step up to save the election for the party in the dying days of the campaign.

Mr Hayes has said the party underestimated the unpopularity of the Government, and accepted the Fine Gael campaign was too Dublin-centric.

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