Painting FG into a very tight corner - Mr Kenny’s leadership

SOME time ago, well before this year’s election, when the leadership of Fianna Fáil was questioned in a way it might not be today, party venerable Willie O’Dea admitted that when he looked around the table at a Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting he did not see a messiah. 

He admitted too, that when he looked in the mirror he did not see one either. This morning, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny looks in a hotel mirror in Newbridge, Co Kildare, where Fine Gael are holding a two-day parliamentary party gathering, it is hard to imagine that he sees a messiah of any kind. In the unlikely event that he does it is hard to imagine that even his most steadfast supporters might share that epiphany.

The mirror-mirror-on-the-wall comparison is not entirely valid though. Mr O’Dea opened his heart as one of the survivors of Fianna Fáil’s most traumatic — and justified — dismissal by an outraged electorate. He was reflecting on the fate of the rump of a once — and possibly again — dominant party. His conclusions were not of immediate importance to the wellbeing of the nation. He was indulging in chit-chat, not policy making. Mr Kenny makes that self-appraisal as leader of a government that promised a new kind of politics but is spancelled by disunity and the kind of one-size-fits-all compromise needed to sustain such reluctant, ill-matched bedfellows. He may be the nominal leader but he does not have a free hand or anything like one. Rather than discipline dissenters, he must, as the Halligan farce showed, placate them or risk the election that seems ever more imminent.