Bertie Ahern also had his problems, so don’t underestimate Enda Kenny

I THINK it was US politician Adlai Stevenson who once said that a statesman approaches every issue with an open mind and a politician approaches every issue with an open mouth.

By that definition, Fine Gael TD John Deasy is never going to be a statesman.

Now and again, you come across politicians who know how to use the media silly season to their advantage. They usually don’t have an awful lot to say, and they’re often marked out by a lack of diligence and application in other respects. But they have a shrewd eye for a quiet news day and they’re good at drawing attention to themselves.

Strangely, a lot of them don’t seem to care if the attention they draw reflects them in a favourable light or not.

John Deasy appears to be just such a politician, and not a lot more than that. He has wasted and frittered away his talents by carrying on like a schoolboy, especially when grown-up politics are called for. And he’s probably lucky too. If he had been a member of Fianna Fáil, he would probably have spent the past weekend nursing the sort of feelings that an insect gets when it is trod on by a large and heavy boot.

There are many, I’m sure, in Fine Gael and elsewhere who must have felt that the same boot should have been applied by someone in their own party — but that would be a mistake.

Because oddly, although it was the last thing on his mind, Mr Deasy did his party a favour through his childish remarks on a possible leadership challenge within the party. If he had been kicked out or silenced in some way, media debate would have centred on FG’s attitude to free speech and, at least for the kindergarten end of politics, Deasy would have become a martyr.

By telling him instead, in almost as so many words, to grow up and get on with his job, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny did exactly the right thing — demonstrating, in the process, that he is a lot more grown-up than some of the pygmies sniping at him.

Enda Kenny faces a really difficult challenge. And the odd thing about it is that it is precisely the same challenge that was faced, and overcome, by Bertie Ahern, the existing holder of the office Kenny wants to fill. It’s the challenge of being underestimated. People forget that, in 1997, Bertie Ahern was widely seen everywhere as being too lightweight for the job he was seeking. Fianna Fáil even created a poster, hung on thousands of lampposts around the country, aimed at giving him some gravitas. Party political broadcasts were made, showing the Taoiseach speaking from an imposing desk in a book-lined study.

The images were aimed at creating the sub-text that here was a thinker and not just an operator, a man of vision and not just a cunning tactician.

What were the strengths Bertie had going for him then? He was seen as decent, ordinary, pint of plain sort of man, with a pretty good record when it came to fixing strikes and negotiating wage deals. No one could trace a single major policy statement he had ever made on any subject outside his brief, and nor could anyone track down any public utterance that suggested he had bottom lines.

For years he had functioned as a peacemaker inside an increasingly fractious party, and it was widely believed, on his accession to the leadership in late 1994, that at least he would be able to unite the party after a number of years of intensely damaging events.

So he did, and after two years of distinctly uninspired opposition, he led them into a campaign in which his likeability, even his ordinariness, became major assets.

Bertie Ahern followed in the recent footsteps of a series of major political heavyweights who, for good or ill, stamped their own personalities on Irish politics.

Charlie Haughey, Garret FitzGerald, Des O’Malley, Dick Spring, even Albert Reynolds — all in their day had stood for something radically different to what had gone before. All had projected a different vision. Perhaps the time had come for a politician who seemed steady, a good listener, one of our own.

There were two other factors in that election: first, Bertie had a simple, easy to understand promise. He offered lower tax rates. The outgoing government was determined to approach the issue of tax reduction in a way that was fairer, but their message was complex and a hard sell. Second, the outgoing government, especially the Labour element, was unpopular, for historical reasons.

IF Labour had held on to the seats it had won in 1992 in that 1997 election, Bertie Ahern would probably never have been Taoiseach. In 1997, the people didn’t vote Bertie in — they voted the existing government out. No one realised that, I believe, more than Bertie Ahern himself, and by the time the next election came around, he fought it on a completely different basis.

By then, the experience of office and his achievements in relation to Northern Ireland and the economy had transformed people’s perceptions of the Taoiseach’s qualities.

Still an ordinary man, still a pint of plain one, but now he was an accomplished national and international figure, with the capacity to attract transfers from across the electorate in a way that no previous leader of Fianna Fáil had ever managed.

But the lesson to be learned from all this is that Bertie Ahern overcame the problem of being underestimated, to go from a point where no one saw him as a real leader at all to a stage where many — including many in his own party — now see him as irreplaceable.

If Bertie Ahern could do it, there is no reason why Enda Kenny can’t do it. And there is every reason to believe that

Kenny, like Ahern and others before him, will grow in office if he gets there.

Look what he has achieved already. He inherited a party on its knees, just as Dick Spring did in 1981. Virtually every commentator in the country, including me, predicted the imminent demise of the party that can lay claim to the founding of the State.

He put discipline into it, and set about raising morale among his beaten and embittered troops. And he did it through sheer energy and enthusiasm, crisscrossing the country at nights and weekends. Little by little he took his demoralised party and turned it, once again, into a formidable fighting machine.

Kenny promised that if elected leader he would electrify Fine Gael, and he did so. He took losers and made them winners, especially in the local and European elections. And, along the way, he injected a sense of decency and optimism into politics, and a hunger for change.

We still don’t know whether he has the capacity to electrify Ireland in the way he electrified his own party. All across the country, people who want to vote the Government out are still asking is it safe, and if it would be worthwhile to vote the alternative in.

In asking that, they may be underestimating Enda Kenny, and I think they probably are. But he still has to provide the right answers.