Enda Kenny has been talking to his imaginary friend again
As we have noted before, the number of such transient, walk-on bit players who helpfully prop up a political stance without ever having to come forward is reaching epic proportions.
Defending the April Fool’s Day release of water-tax bills, Mr Kenny told the Dáil: “The man who stopped me with the two pints in his hand last week was shouting about the cost of water that he couldn’t pay for. And I said to him, what he was holding in his hands would pay for water for him — because I know him — for nearly 10 weeks.”
Now, Mr Kenny has form for being a bit, shall we say, imaginative , and the fact he apparently used the very same anecdote in February brought more suspicion.
Either this nameless anti-water-charge person has quite a serious drink problem, or Mr Kenny has a very serious memory problem.
Perhaps that is why the Taoiseach finds it so difficult to tell us what actually happened when he sent a senior civil servant, under cover of darkness, to then garda commissioner, Martin Callinan’s home to express his displeasure, just hours before the top cop suddenly “resigned”..
The Taoiseach even started inventing imaginary laws as a fig leaf for his pathetic refusals to answer even the most basic questions on the subject, questions such as: did he give evidence to the investigation launched by Judge Nial Fennelly into the curious affair?
Mr Kenny insisted to say so would be to break the law regarding tribunals of inquiry.
An unusual, and also completely wrong, interpretation of the law, as the investigators said it would only be an offence to divulge details of the evidence given, not the fact that evidence was offered.
Sadly for Mr Kenny, we fear it may be some time before he can delight us with a tale along the lines of: “I bumped into this judge the other day and he told me that I did not effectively sack the Garda commissioner and thus mislead parliament, and, therefore, do not need to resign immediately.”
Like chaos in the Middle East, a lot of all this politicians-meeting-makey-uppy people malarkey is the fault of former British prime minister, Tony Blair.
Blair was opposition leader when he bludgeoned a Labour conference with details of his encounter with “Mondeo Man” — a voter washing his car in the West Midlands who told him exactly how the party had to change to win his vote back and regain power.
Coincidentally, Mondeo Man’s centre-right, macro-economic agenda chimed magically with Mr Blair’s own.
This is probably because the whole thing was a tissue of lies, or as Labour spin-handlers were later forced to explain, Mondeo Man was not an individual, after all, but an “amalgam” of encounters.
Mr Kenny was caught out in a similarly crude ruse after the last Budget, when he over-excited himself with the news that workers had been in touch with him to say thank you for all the tax reductions showered down upon them.
“It was great to see some people contacting us, saying: ‘Well, I’m not sure whether it was a mistake or not, but I seem to have got extra money in this last payment.’ We want to continue that,” Mr Kenny gushed.
And it was indeed a mistake — because it never happened, or, as a spokesperson sheepishly explained, it was just a “turn of phrase”.
When lambasted for his Government’s lack of urgency when dealing with the growing homelessness crisis last year, Mr Kenny gave the Dáil the impression marriage tiffs were to blame for homelessness as, luckily, he had just had another chance encounter with a rough sleeper.
“I spoke to somebody on the street the other night, from a county outside Dublin, who had had a row with his spouse, was on the streets and, according to himself, will be on them for a couple of weeks,” Mr Kenny told TDs.
The discovery of Jonathan Corrie’s cold, dead body, metres from the gates of the Dáil in December, finally woke the Taoiseach up to the fact there might be something more going on here than the odd marriage spat, and the Government was forced into taking belated action to deal with the scandal of people sleeping rough.
But, then, no matter how many warnings this Government gets, it waits until crisis-point before actually doing anything.
Thus, we have Finance Minister Michael Noonan’s faint-hearted, empty rhetoric on “shaming” the banks into passing on variable mortgage-rate cuts to families already struggling to keep a roof above their heads.
One thing we have learned from the crash is that banks just do not do shame.
They will suck up all the public money thrown at them, but when the public needs help, the message from bankers is clear: You’re on your own, buddy’.
Rather than bleat from the sidelines, Mr Noonan should take the powers to impose his will and end this deeply unfair, counterproductive squeeze by bankers.
And it was a similar story with Mr Kenny on zero-hours contracts, as he — almost — verbally backed the striking Dunnes Stores workers as they battled for basic dignity in the workplace.
But as with mortgages, on collective bargaining we need substance, not sound bites, from the Taoiseach and Mr Noonan.
Otherwise, they are going to walk into a reality shock where someone actually tells them the truth, which is that on zero-hours contracts, and on so much else, they have zero credibility.
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