Blue rinse Smurfs had more photo sense than Kenny

ONE is leader of the Blueshirts, the other is leader of a bunch of blue blobs, but it seems that Papa Smurf has a stronger moral compass than Enda Kenny and Co.

Mr Kenny’s child-like delight at being allowed to open the New York Stock Exchange last month is thrown into sharp relief when you consider that The Smurfs were awarded the same “honour” last August.

And Papa Smurf and his mates (intriguingly there is only one lady Smurf in the village) carried off the affair with a tad more dignity than the Taoiseach managed.

The reason being that, unlike Kenny, The Smurfs showed the good sense not to have media tycoon Denis O’Brien in tow with them when they sounded the trading bell.

Mr Kenny’s incredibly limp defence for posing with O’Brien — against whom the Moriarty Tribunal found negatively — is that he cannot decide who he is, is or not, photographed with. Oh, Enda, you’re Prime Minister of a small, but reasonably prominent country, is that really the best you could come up with?

The re-emergence of disgraced deputy Michael Lowry from the shadows once again throws into focus why O’Brien may not be the best photo-op bud for the Taoiseach as Moriarty ruled former Fine Gael Communications Minister Lowry had “secured the winning” of the State’s second mobile phone licence for O’Brien, and that O’Brien provided payments and benefits worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to Mr Lowry.

The tribunal found that O’Brien made two payments to Lowry in 1996 and 1999 totalling approximately £500,000 and backed a loan of stg£420,000 given to Lowry in 1999. Mr Justice Moriarty said the payments from Mr O’Brien were “demonstrably referable to the acts and conduct of Mr Lowry” during the mobile licence process.

Both men insist the movement of such monies was all perfectly innocent. Mr Justice Moriarty found it to be “a clandestine system to confer payments.”

Opening the Dáil debate on Moriarty last year, the Taoiseach said the report had exposed “breathtaking attempts to acquire, use and access privilege” and would ”weary and bewilder people more than others. In these straitened times, when people are hurting and suffering so badly, what the report exposes is all the more galling, damaging and worrying.”

And in a strongly worded swipe at the attacks on Mr Justice Moriarty launched by O’Brien and Lowry in the days following the report’s publication, Mr Kenny said: “The tribunal finds seriously, and serially, against Deputy Michael Lowry and others who are major players in Irish business and public life. “The minister for justice has already addressed the arrogance, unseemliness and danger of their public reaction.”

Strong words indeed, but if a picture really is worth a thousand of them, the shot of Kenny cosying-up to O’Brien on the New York Stock Exchange says it all.

But then Enda, “Big” Phil Hogan and O’Brien all go back a long way.

During that Moriarty Dáil debate Socialist TD Joe Higgins was fascinated by O’Brien’s generous bounty in the mid-90s, quoting a letter from Fine Gael’s Phil Hogan sent to the Esat boss seven weeks before the awarding of the contract which thanked the tycoon for his contribution to a party golf tournament fundraiser, stressing: “Your very generous sponsorship of £4,000 will be used two-fold, with £1,000 sponsoring a hole and the remaining balance sponsoring the wine for the gala dinner.”

Ever handy with a whiplash turn of phrase, Higgins added: “Two months before Fine Gael in government awarded the most valuable contract in the history of this state, the private individual who was desperately looking for it was lubricating the throats of Fine Gael grandees at a gala dinner. Is it not obvious to everybody this was to lubricate the licence process?”

But while Fine Gael may have been so grateful to have received £1,000 for the sponsorship of that hole, Moriarty left a much bigger hole in their credibility.

This took the form of awkward questions about $50,000 the party received from Esat partners Telenor which went to them along a route that would make a crazy golf course seem uneventful and pedestrian.

After Moriarty denounced the way the donation had been handled as “secretive, utterly lacking in transparency, and designed to conceal the fact of such payment, by or on behalf of the donors,” Kenny admitted acceptance was “wrong” and that he regretted the “circuitous route” it had taken to be returned back.

Indeed, explorers circumnavigating the globe have taken less gruelling trajectories than that battered cheque did — but at least it got to cool its heels while “resting” in an off-shore account along the way.

At the time Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams triggered uproar when he branded the way the funds were channelled to Fine Gael as “classic money-laundering”. (Please insert your own Northern Bank raid joke here.)

Kenny used the same debate to attack Bertie Ahern as “a Taoiseach degrading our nation and this office by trousering after-dinner tips.”

The Mahon corruption probe has since finally exposed Ahern as a liar and we know those “tips” never really existed.

But is it worse to be pocketing tips, or to be — as Lowry’s then Rainbow Cabinet colleagues like Kenny were — dumb waiters, manipulated and misled by a middle-ranking minister who, Moriarty ruled, was helping O’Brien secure the most lucrative contract in the history of the state?

The same Lowry that Big Phil, Michael Noonan and James Reilly threw their doors open to after he was exposed as having engaged in a “profoundly corrupt” act with businessman Ben Dunne over an attempt to set rents.

Would the liar Ahern get the same access if he were still a TD? No way. So just what hold does Lowry still have on Fine Gael?

Surely not because he knows too much about what really went on in Fine Gael in 1990s and the party would be loathe for him to share that knowledge with the public? No, the very idea is too outrageous to even entertain.

As pathetic is Fianna Fáil’s attempt to take the moral high ground on this as Micheal Martin conveniently forgets it was a grubby little deal with Lowry that left him in high office for so long.

Lowry is a broken, risible figure of the past, O’Brien still controls so much of what we are allowed to read and hear through his vast radio and print empire — that is why Enda is happy to turn a blind eye. That is why we need to keep our own eyes open.