Emotionally intelligent leader with a disregard for public image

Any good spin doctor would have done the moan-in-the-throat indicating a planned action has a lot going for it — but that, at the same time, it carries potential problems.

Enda Kenny serves as a human magnet for the phrase ‘Yeah, but’. During the last general election, the most frequent comment was that he’d really dragged Fine Gael up off their knees and was a tremendously hardworking decent skin. Then would come the ‘Yeah, but’

It would have happened around the middle of last Friday, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny announced he was going to head out to the CRC along with Health Minister James Reilly.

Here’s what any good spin doctor would have respectfully told the top man.

“Taoiseach, it’s a lovely thought, going out there to Clontarf to talk to the embattled staff. But the national media will have packed up their tripods and gone away from CRC, and even if we got them to go back, the story might be swept under all the stuff the Sundays already have lined up, you know the way they are?

“You might be better off getting on the road west and heading home to Castlebar before the Friday evening traffic build-up. Why not do the visit on Monday and effectively set the media tone for the week?”

Enda Kenny would close that down in a heartbeat. Once he decided that the poor divils out in the CRC were getting it in the neck for something horrible that none of them had a hand in, he was going out there and taking Reilly with him and that was all there was to it.

What the hell would he be wanting media there for? (As it happened, some local media stragglers spotted the Taoiseach’s car arriving, so it figured in a small way in one or two Saturday papers).

It might not have made traditional PR sense, but it made total sense in emotional intelligence terms. The CRC staff were already traumatised enough, with microphones being poked in their car windows, without another round of photo opportunities. Without warning, they had found themselves in a version of the problem faced a couple of years ago by the lower orders in Anglo. And when you’re at the coal face in a brand that has suddenly gone toxic, your priority is unlikely to lie in appearing on the news. It may, rather, lie in finding ways to describe your employer, when you’re asked questions about your career, without ever using the name or initialism of that employer.

Even describing it as “emotionally intelligent”, however, is to categorise the action in a way that misses its point. Enda Kenny goes to see people who are going through hard times because he knows he can help.

He can help because he’s a man people talk to, and talking is of major benefit in a disaster or bereavement. Hearing ourselves articulate what happened helps us to understand it and cope with it. Talking it out with a man who listens and gives you time and attention, but who is also the prime minister of your country has added advantages.

Now, when the history of these years is written, that visit won’t figure, because history deals with conflict and controversy, never comfort and kindness. But it demonstrates several of the characteristics that add up to the uniqueness of Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. He has an unparalleled instinct for human need and a matching immediacy of personal response to it. He has no interest in public relations, indeed is somewhat suspicious of it. He is never so overwhelmed by arguably the most crowded diary in Ireland to see the need to postpone or ignore a small group of individuals who might gain from meeting him.

Enda Kenny serves as a human magnet for the phrase “Yeah, but.” During the last general election, the most frequent comment was that he’d really dragged Fine Gael up off their knees and was a tremendously hardworking decent skin. Then would come the “Yeah, but.” Yeah, but was he the man to lead a coalition government at a time of economic meltdown? Short answer to that seems in the affirmative, so far.

Then came the “decent Catholic family man” with the “Yeah, but” of whether he could take on the Catholic Church. He did. Some of the “Yeah buttery” arises out of an intellectual condescension which sees him as doing quite well as Taoiseach, but of course without the intellectual prowess of historic Fine Gael leaders. This positioning allows praise of Kenny while the person delivering the praise stays decently distanced from him.

THE fact is that Enda Kenny could buy and sell most of the current members of the House and a rake of past members, too. He understands the territorial imperative and the driving force of ambition. He manages to see past the obvious to hidden motivation without being cynical about the latter.

Many in media and most newcomers to politics move from shock to cynicism when they discover — shock, horror — that some people are in it for what they can get out of it. Kenny would be baffled by that shock-to-cynicism progression because he sees human greed, ambition, conspiracy, and treachery as unbroken threads in the weave of humanity. He would be baffled if he ever reflected on it, but he never reflects on things like that. Nor does he reflect on why people develop transient or permanent hatred of him. If his partners in government get touchy about something he’s done, he pays total attention and sets out to get the problem solved.

His personal pride? Irrelevant. This is the machinery of government and it’s his job to get the clogs out of the works, never mind who owns the footwear.

Few men in politics have anything close to his throughput, his commitment, his diligence, fitness and boundless energy. The nearest would be Micheál Martin. Very few political leaders have his capacity to get the best out of a necessarily motley crew. Enda Kenny stepped across years of what might euphemistically be called “distance” with the appointment of Michael Noonan to the finance brief, and could not now be more proud of Noonan’s stellar performance.

But what’s most interesting about Kenny’s leadership of his Cabinet is that he invests faith in all of its members and is infinitely supportive of them. Like all political leaders, the Taoiseach, every day, is reached by those eager to tell him of the errors, inadequacies or incompetence of one or another of his Cabinet. Unlike, say, Charlie Haughey, who not only agreed with everybody bringing him bad news about his Cabinet, but was openly contemptuous of many of them and interfered in the briefs of all of them, the Taoiseach, while never preventing the arrival of potentially useful information, takes it in a positive context — a context of continuum which sees any individual ministerial failure as the result of the individual needing more support to get them back on their game.

Now, “Yeah buttery” immediately says “Ah, yeah, Kenny’s OK as a team manager, but that’s not leadership.”

It’s not? Assuming the best of your people, encouraging them, ignoring past differences (and that’s putting it euphemistically) supporting them through bad times and keeping them all focussed on doing the best for the nation isn’t leadership?

Enda Kenny may yet be the best leader his party has had. He’s indubitably the most chronically underrated leader it has had.

* Terry Prone’s company, The Communications Clinic, is retained to provide training services to Fine Gael.