Kenny and Noonan: a tale of genius, sharp wit and the capacity to listen

THIS is a guess.

But almost a guarantee, at the same time.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny will not do a round of the summer talk shows to emphasise the importance of his declaratory statement about Church and state.

He won’t do that, because Enda Kenny doesn’t like anything to do with conscious, planned PR. It’s one of the few ways in which the current Taoiseach and his predecessor are alike.

Both believe that the job of the Taoiseach is about doing things, not selling the public how well they’re doing things.

Signs on it, when Enda Kenny stood up in Leinster House to read the “gimlet eye” speech that echoed around the world, Government Information Services had not flagged media in advance that something significant was about to happen, nor had the Taoiseach’s own people done any strategic promotional leaking.

None of which is to suggest that the Taoiseach does not want credit when he gets something right.

It is to suggest that he has an old-fashioned faith in the future, in the capacity of historians to make sound judgements, and a matching lack of belief in the importance of contemporary commentary, which is kind of sensible of him, because if he’d paid much attention to contemporary commentary about himself over the past nine years, he’d never have been able to get out of bed in the morning.

His comments after the reduction of Ireland’s interest rate on our EU borrowings and the lengthening of the payback time, were typical and amounted to a simple statement: We said we’d do it. We did it. End of story.

That’s the way he always presents it. That’s the way he presented the re-shuffle of his front bench after the heave. Michael Noonan was going to be spokesman on finance.

End of story.

Except that the handing of the finance portfolio to the Limerick man and the follow-up of appointing him to the Cabinet were, in themselves, chapters in a fascinating and complex story.

Michael Noonan came out of a decade of near-anonymity, walked up the steps of the Department of Finance and took on the rescue of the national finances as if it was exactly what he might have been expected to do. The fact that he metaphorically stepped into the same river twice with obvious success contradicts the accepted wisdom that such a step is not possible.

Returning Noonan to centre stage in Irish politics and history is testament to the political genius of Kenny,

The word “genius” tends to be applied in a facile way to demonstrably intellectual politicians like Garret FitzGerald, and is easy to ridicule when thumb-tacked to Kenny. Easy, but wrong.

Political genius lies in having an instinct rooted in experience and judgement of people, in matching action to context when the unprecedented nature of the context might provoke endless analysis.

In giving Noonan the finance portfolio, post-heave, Kenny was making two decisions at the one time. The second decision was that Noonan would be Finance Minister in a Fine Gael-led Government.

Like his speech about the separation of Church and state, those two decisions can be portrayed as easy. In fact, neither was easy. It was never going to be easy for Kenny to appoint Noonan to anything.

When the latter became Leader of Fine Gael, he consigned Kenny to the back benches, and it was not the doing of the deed but the manner of its doing that rankled most.

In the years following, the two of them, when they had no choice but to be physically, if briefly, together, bounced bonhomie off each other as a guard against any real engagement. When Noonan, in his turn, went to the back benches, his retreat to the obscurity of regional politics was relieved only by work on committees and the occasional media outing on issues as pivotally important as the threatening nature of the hoodie.

He suffered grievously during those back -bench years, not because he lacked office, but because his health was bad and his home life was gradually destroyed by his wife’s Alzheimer’s. Flor Noonan’s illness took control out of the hands of a man who loves to be in control and deepened his insight.

When he talked to Pat Kenny on the Frontline programme, he did none of the political claims of achievement. On the contrary, he said he had got it wrong at every point of the illness. It was the interview of a man at the end of his career, informed by a sad serenity.

Then came the summer heave against Kenny and Noonan’s re-appointment to the front bench. Like an old duellist, Noonan tested the heft and flex of the sword he was handed, measured out his steps and knew that this was what everything in his political life to that point had fitted him for.

Even the absence of a major time-consuming role in recent years contributed. It had allowed him to get to know newer back-benchers and to be seen by them as a) riotously good company when the day’s work was done, and b) a source of analysis, advice and encouragement.

One of Noonan’s strengths has always been his capacity to identify and pull at the loose threads in a thesis. Nobody is his equal in responding on behalf of the Opposition to a ministerial budget speech, a task made more difficult by the emptying of the house around the speaker and the disappearance of journalists from the press gallery. Yet Noonan would always spot the weakness, nail it with sound-bite wit (like his “what did the third child do on ye?” question to the late Brian Lenihan) and influence how the budget was publicly understood the next day and in the days thereafter.

BECAUSE the immediacy of his wit is a political rarity, it is much commented-upon, and that makes it easy to miss a matching strength, apparent in recent photographs of him with EU figures like Christine Lagarde. Picture after picture shows Noonan, head slightly tilted, eyes fixed on the other person, hands loosely clasped, listening. Sometimes smiling. Sometimes serious. But always listening. Listening to the thesis. Listening for the discrepancy. Listening for the point on which it may be possible to build a line of persuasion leading to a decision.

Ultimately, the habit of listening and then making a decision is what characterises good governance in any sphere. It also makes ministers easier to work for, whereas a combination of indecisiveness and impatience renders ministers lousy at their job and cordially loathed by those who work for them.

Those who work for Michael Noonan divide into the “lifers,” the people who have been around him forever, and the bright young Turks within his department. They couldn’t be more different, those two groups — or more alike. Both camps are zealous — and jealous. They want to do well for him, to present him with a win. They also desperately want to own a bit of him, to belong to him.

Even though they know that, last week’s events notwithstanding, he will still be seen — forever — as the Austerity Minister. The minister who constantly said “No.”

Because he had to.