Unanticipated aura of calm shields Kenny from Dáil’s slings and arrows
He’ll take on good ideas, but wouldn’t himself be a powerhouse of innovative notions like John Bruton. He’s got a lovely personality when you meet him, but wouldn’t be anything like as easy in front of a camera as Alan Dukes.
It goes on and on, the instinctive “give a thing, take it back” interpretations of Taoiseach Enda Kenny, predicated, as they always are, on the assumption that while there’s no harm in the Mayo man, he nonetheless fails to measure up to some inchoate definition of what constitutes a good leader.
Part of it derives from the imprinting of history on members of any political party. Just as a Fianna Fáiler might, once upon a long time ago, have been happy to describe himself as “a Charlie man”, with a gleeful underlying association with the smell of sulphur, so members of Fine Gael will say that they came into that party “because of Garret”, basking in a worshipful underlying association with squeaky clean intellectualism. Fine Gaelers talk about their first encounter with Garret the way people talk about meeting the Dalai Lama: The threads might be dodgy, but the generalised enlightenment powerful.
Then, too, there’s the issue of familiarity breeding contempt, albeit, in Kenny’s case, affectionate contempt. Kenny has been around forever. During much of his time in politics, he was a backbencher in an opposition party. In showbiz terms, he’d have been a small step above an extra. One of our own, with all the unaddressed dismissive assumptions implicit therein: Great company, lovely man to have a pint with because the craic’s mighty around him. And no more than that.
When a man shucks off the cocoon of benign disregard and is reborn as party leader, it’s difficult — especially so for long-term Fine Gael TDs — to see him as anything other than a likeable version of an examiner from KPMG, installed in a troubled company to get it flying straight, at which point the examiner’s transient function will die and a permanent MD will take over.
The sense that Kenny could not be more than an interim leader was largely founded on two areas of dissatisfaction. The first was leaders’ questions in Leinster House, and the desire that he would learn to land killer blows. Each week, TDs, senators, advisers, and SCs would offer him great lines. Witty. Well-argued. Calculated to crease the questioner. Kenny would listen to them all, take the bits of paper from them, and thank them all warmly. But at the last minute he would balk like a horse refusing a fence, and do it so late that he was left standing in a tangle of fallen, painted poles. It wasn’t that he was hostile to spin. He just couldn’t do it.
If he doesn’t own it, he’s not saying it. He may see emotional self-exposure as slightly indecent, but that’s not why he’s never comfortable with the classic interviewer questions of “who made you what you are?” or “how did you feel when…?” The fact is that Enda Kenny is one of the least personally reflective men alive.
Long before Oprah Winfrey advised the world to live in the moment, he was doing just that.
Plato held that the unexamined life is not worth living. Kenny patently believes the opposite. He’s happy not to examine his life while he’s living it. It was typical of Kenny that when a journalist asked him to co-operate with a biography the journalist was writing, the Taoiseach invited him into Government Buildings, not just to politely refuse, but to indicate that the very notion of a biography gave him the creeps. He wasn’t going to get in John Downing’s way, and he wished him luck, but he had no interest in influencing the portrait of him it would present and anyway, he wasn’t going to read it, any more than he reads any profile written about him. He has more to be doing with his time than examining himself in a media mirror.
HE’S a bit like the director in the old story about the rehearsals for a play featuring a method actor. In rehearsal, the director instructs the actor to move stage left. The actor looks unhappy.
“What’s the problem?” the director asks. “I told you to move stage left.”
“Yes, I know,” the actor says politely. “But what’s my motivation for the move?”
“Your what?”
“My motivation.”
Long silence.
“Your motivation is a pay cheque at the end of the week. You want to get paid, move stage left.”
It never occurs to Kenny to explore motivation — his own or anybody else’s. His view seems to be that people do what they do because they are who they are. It saves him an enormous amount of time, particularly when people do what he would prefer they didn’t do.
In that situation, Kenny never gets into untangling their mindset. He just focuses on how to undo whatever they’ve done, if it’s getting in his way.
But because everybody decided he was pure useless on the floor of the house or in a TV studio, and because concrete evidence rarely alters an established belief, people didn’t notice that, when he became Taoiseach, he knew exactly what to do when answering leaders’ questions, and needed no smart scripts to cope with a variety of opposition speakers. Or that he’s perfectly at home at a televised press conference — witness him humming to himself as he took the stage at the jobs scheme gig last week — or facing a bank of microphones and cameras as he emerges from an EU summit.
He is extraordinary in his ordinariness. He slips into formality with the ease of an old teacher: “Settle down there, now, at the back.” Yet he can expeditiously establish a relationship of trust with people who would be daunted by formality, such as the Magdalene women. He ignores old conflicts — witness his empowerment of Michael Noonan. He also ignores opinion polls and media criticism, which makes no sense except for the fact that if opinion polls and media criticism were predictive of the future, he’d never have become Taoiseach.
He took over a party that was missing chunks of its undercarriage, yet got Fine Gael flying straight and landed them on the government runway. He created a government of such overwhelming numbers that it can impose measures that nobody likes on the way to a shared objective. He is straight, sober, presentable, an orator capable of era-marking speeches, and he works like an ox. Creating his own legacy doesn’t seem high on his agenda. In fact, if Enda Kenny had a theme song, it would be ‘One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus’.
By any measure, he’s the best Fine Gael leader ever.
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