Kenny plays politics with vital probe

Taoiseach Enda Kenny is not known for his subtlety.

Yet, even by his standards, his opening performance at the Oireachtas banking inquiry yesterday was a crude and blatant attempt to use parliamentary time to make the opening salvo in next year’s general election.

Outlining Fine Gael’s response to the crisis while in opposition, he said that, just prior to the collapse, the economy had became uncompetitive and bloated.

That is a fair enough analysis, but he then went on to charge that successive Fianna Fáil-led governments caused the “lion’s share of the damage” to the Irish economy, while ignoring his party’s acquiescence to public spending increases during the boom years.

He then went on to offer an unremitting diatribe against Fianna Fáil and all its works.

The Taoiseach exhibited selective memory, apparently forgetting that, while in opposition, Fine Gael did not raise any red flags about where all this increase in spending might eventually lead.

In fact, Fine Gael encouraged — even demanded on occasion — that the Fianna Fáil-led government raise public spending and did not sound any meaningful warnings that either the property market or the economy as a whole was overheating.

Just a year prior to the crash, he described the economy as ‘sound’ and forecast that it would grow steadily. He now claims that he knew it was fundamentally broken.

In contrast to Kenny’s evidence, the performances this week and last by former taoisigh Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern were more measured and more humble.

Both defended their patches, pointing to the improvement in infrastructure during the boom but they also showed contrition for mistakes while acknowledging the hard work to repair the economy being done by the FG-Labour coalition.

It would have been more statesmanlike for Mr Kenny to have done likewise.

He might have taken a lesson from the approach taken by Labour’s Pat Rabbitte and Joan Burton during their evidence who were, respectively, party leader and finance spokeswoman during the height of the crisis.

Mr Rabbitte had the grace to acknowledge that, while having great concern with regards to the property market, he “did not make the connection” that the Irish banking system might fail until autumn 2008.

Ms Burton, while claiming that Labour would have let Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide fail or be nationalised, also acknowledged her party’s shortcomings. “Nobody anticipated the entire collapse of the banking and construction systems,” she told the inquiry.

It was a fair admission by two senior politicians that neither of them had the foresight to see what was coming down the line. It would have been better if the Taoiseach had taken a similar, more measured, approach to his deliberations. The pity of it is that, in his evidence to the inquiry, he showed that he is a politician first and a statesman second.