The power of negative thinking might be way forward for Fine Gael

SOMEONE injected Enda Kenny with truth serum over the holidays. He’s being so honest it would worry you.

First of all, he says he's not champing at the bit to replace President McAleese with someone from Fine Gael. If she ain't broke and she's showing no sign of breakages don't fix her. Let her at it, while he gets the troops to concentrate on the European and local elections.

So far, so good. As a politician, the normal next step would be for him to predict how well FG's going to do in those elections.

But no. He's not making any positive noises. It's as if he's writing a book on the sly called 'The Power of Negative Thinking'. His party is not going to do well at all, at all, he says. His party is going to lose, rather than gain seats in the local elections.

It's not even Little Christmas and he's taking down the decorations. If the Fine Gael children thought they were playing Sorry! or Scrabble, Daddy's disabusing them: they're playing Extinction. And they'd better rattle that dice with care.

For a chronically optimistic, buoyant personality like Kenny to adopt such a negative position at the beginning of a year is significant. It indicates that, no matter how much the leader values Frank Flannery's reorganisation work, he nonetheless sees organisational strength as background, like the set in which a TV show is played out.

Having been on the Dunphy show, Kenny knows the oohs and aaahs with which the aficionados greeted the Helix set didn't make a ha'porth of difference when the show was going down the tubes. Similarly, if Fine Gael can't mount a good show, organisational improvements will mean only that it will fold more efficiently.

Self-protection may also be part of his motivation. In recent times, Fine Gael has tended, like the Red Queen, to yell "Off with his head!" in the face of any setback, as a way of avoiding the wider, less obvious, more discomfiting causes of that setback. Kenny's opted not to serve as star distraction.

"The last time the people voted for Fine Gael we got 22% of the vote," he said, this weekend. "I was honoured with the leadership after that. That is the base I am working from. That is what I was left with."

In other words: "This is not a swing low, sweet chariot situation, where the chariot will swing back up in time. The Fine Gael chariot was scraping its underside on the tarmac long before I got stuck with oops, long before I was honoured with the leadership.

"Do the math and realise that lining me up as a scapegoat won't make the sums come out right. You know that old phrase 'You can't fall off the floor'? Don't forget it. Because Fine Gael could yet prove it wrong. A dubious achievement."

Invoking the power of negative thinking can sometimes be productive.

Triage, the effective management of battlefield casualties, is a classic product of the most negative thinking possible.

Triage says you don't waste time on casualties so far gone they're going to die whatever you do for them. Nor do you waste time on walking wounded. Instead, you concentrate on the middle group for whom attention and expertise can make all the difference.

Kenny's triage clearly identifies the presidency, this time around, as a waste of effort. If Mary McAleese nominates herself as a non-party candidate, then he'd be happy to go to his Parliamentary Party to ask them to help him give her a free pass to a second term.

Although Fine Gael didn't get too badly sideswiped in the last Presidential election, they didn't enjoy it and show no great hunger for a re-run.

Indeed, a long interval to help the development of national amnesia about Presidential elections might be a very good thing. Last time out was great media and rotten reality.

Albert got his giblets handed to him in a spectacularly humiliating way. Fianna Fáil got so tetchy in the aftermath that one of them squared up to RTÉ's Jim Fahy before (or maybe after) a press conference. This briefly re-branded Fahy, who up to that point hadn't been widely appreciated as a pivotal electoral force.

ONE candidate, long before polling day, found his scriptwriters and coaches were getting huffy because he just wouldn't do what he was told (There's nothing as annoying as a puppet that pulls its arms free of the strings).

Another found herself condemned as unworthy because what was her crime again? Oh, yes. She hummed along with a song. Imagine. In public.

At the end of it all, Dana got to utter Jonathan Philbin Bowman's great line: "I may not be a president, but I'm certainly a precedent." And Mary McAleese went to the Park, albeit not on quite so effusively enthusiastic terms as had Mary Robinson.

The new President was big on wide-blue-yonder rhetoric and easy warmth. The cool side of the pillow was presented by Justine McCarthy's authoritative biography, which offered something of a corrective. The nation wasn't much bothered, one way or the other, once the election was over.

She wasn't the first woman elected to the job, after all, and she wasn't ushered into office to the sound of moulds breaking. All she had to do was follow Noel Coward's advice to an over-conscientious young actor: "Don't worry about the motivation, dear boy. Just say the lines and don't fall over the furniture."

Soon, the word was seeping back from overseas audiences that 'your President' could say the lines well enough to stun audiences and draw tears from stones.

Nor did she fall over the furniture (Don't mention the skis). In performance terms, she met the specifications. Behind the scenes, she was doing a lot more than meeting the specifications.

Mary and Martin McAleese, as a team, were working quietly, relentlessly and effectively on many fronts to create the bridges in the North about which she had talked on her first day as President.

Mary McAleese has exceeded expectations. Enda Kenny, who's rapidly becoming an expert in expectation-management, acknowledges that and would be happy for her to stay doing what she's doing.

If Fianna Fáil have their pragmatic wits about them, they'll go along with the 'non party' designation, since everybody knows Mary McAleese is as Fianna Fáil as the Pope's a Catholic.

The Kenny scenario would, of course, be the ultimate solution to Pat Rabbitte's presidential problems. If the field is full of candidates, then Labour has to get into contention.

If, on the other hand, Enda Kenny's scenario plays out, the man who wants Labour's nomination, Michael D Higgins, might see the impracticality of challenging the popular incumbent all on his own.

This would let Pat Rabbitte off the hook of having to persuade him that, much as they owe Higgins, the investment Labour would have to make in promoting him as a candidate could not be justified.

With one throw of the dice, Kenny has handed the Labour leader the possibility of concentrating on two, rather than three, elections.

That's what friends are for.