OUR (VERY) PRIVILEGED TAOISEACH
ENDA Kenny has never known sacrifice and is therefore incapable of making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the country. If the Taoiseach had regard for the citizens he leads, or even his party, he would have ended the ghastly farce of his second term in office months ago.
He could have resigned with dignity. He can still partially redeem himself and rescue Fine Gael from electoral oblivion if he steps down now. Instead, he has re-embarked on his delusional campaign to keep himself in office.
While Kenny, after 41 years as a TD, knows only a life of privilege, most ordinary families know that life is about the sacrifices we make for the ones we care about.
Families are forced to make tough decisions about money; it would be hard to find friends who haven’t sat around the kitchen table to discuss bills that have to be deferred or who had to cancel the annual holiday for a few years.
Increasingly, 65-year-old men in more humble circumstances than Kenny’s debate with their wives whether they can afford to retire. These enduring sacrifices give people perspective and humility.
Enda Kenny has been on a substantial salary and expenses for all of that 41-year unbroken run in the Dáil. He became a TD at the age of 24, succeeding his father Henry who died in 1975. He made no impression after six years in the Dáil – Garret FitzGerald did not give him a job in his 1981 government. Or his 1982 government, either. He eventually made Cabinet in 1994, 19 years after his election.
Still he was elected Fine Gael leader in 2002, after Fine Gael, led by Michael Noonan, had a general election meltdown. And he became Taoiseach in 2011, when the Fianna Fáil elite were obliterated by the electorate for their recklessness.
He rose from the ashes after others crashed and burned.
In the six years since he became Taoiseach he has earned €1.2m in salary payments and he won’t have had to dip into those payments very often. Since 2002 he has had a chauffeur-driven luxury car. He has a home in Mayo and a luxury apartment yards from the Dáil. When he finishes his pints in Toner’s on Baggot Street he can walk home with a Garda minder. It is unlikely he has debts and mortgage payments that many of us struggled with during the financial crisis. The day he leaves the Dáil he can start drawing a pension of €140,000 (with a golden handshake).
These financial facts illustrate the rarefied life of Enda Kenny, a life that removes him far from the reality of ordinary workers.
HE’S now losing touch with his backbench TDs. Ministers tell me of a man who is remote and unapproachable, secluded in the marble halls of Government Buildings. Reporters who politely ask when he is retiring are treated with imperious irritation.
As the lame duck Kenny clings to power the Dáil is paralysed. Just eight Bills were passed in the autumn session. Four have been passed this year. As his party hurtles chaotically towards oblivion Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin prepare for an election.
Voters gave their verdict on Kenny in last year’s general election, when his party’s share of the vote fell by 11 percentage points, and lost 26 seats. He was a walking disaster zone, wrapping up his campaign in his home town of Castlebar, and in a wide-eyed, roaring frenzy at a local warehouse he shouted at his constituents that they were ‘whingers’.
Then, less than six weeks ago, he embarrassed himself during the latest crisis. He forgot about a meeting he had with Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone and made up another that didn’t happen. This maladministration occurred around false child abuse allegations. He proved finally and irrefutably that he could not do the job.
Party discipline crumbled. Obscure backbenchers strode on to the Leinster House plinth to demand he leave, confident that their leader was so weak they would face no repercussions. He held off rebellious colleagues by saying he would deal with the leadership issue ‘conclusively’ when he returned from the United States.
He hasn’t. He has given vague indications that he wants to remain for the start of Brexit negotiations, having signally failed to deal with the matter in the nine months since that British vote. It is a vote that fundamentally threatens our future. He has ignored Northern Ireland for his whole political career (except when insulting Gerry Adams in the Dáil). Now he wants to help form an administration before he goes. He had one good day in Washington, where he joshed with President Trump and made an impressive, emotive speech on immigration. Does this a reformed Taoiseach make? No.
He feels the Irish media did not give him due credit for his speech. I was in Washington and filed a positive report, yet he’ll always be a rural schoolteacher at heart and undoubtedly his anger is focused on RTÉ; it is State funded and did not give the Taoiseach the air time he felt he was due.
He complained that the US media, notably the New York Times, gave a positive report of his immigration speech, but he had misinterpreted why the New York Times lauded him. The paper is locked in a vicious feud with the president. Trump recently tweeted of the New York Times: ‘FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!,”’
For its own agenda the paper disingenuously implied Kenny stood up to Trump. I was there, he didn’t. When a leader begins feuding with the press it is the surest sign he has lost all perspective.
As the Vietnam War overwhelmed President Lyndon B Johnson he bunkered himself in the White House, while outside protesters chanted: ‘Hey, Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ LBJ turned on the press, complaining: ‘If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: President Can’t Swim.’
Kenny is not the only one in Fine Gael who has become complacent, comfortable and afraid of sacrifice. Housing Minister Simon Coveney and Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar seem stunned into inaction. The less than dazzling Taoiseach has outflanked them.
Coveney will not move because he wants to inherit Kenny’s loyalists in the leadership vote. Varadkar won’t because he does not want to alienate the seven or eight loyalists who may come to him. They don’t do anything because they have become political cowards, so accustomed to the dysfunctional leadership of Kenny that they cannot see how destructive it is.
An obvious move appears to elude them – join forces and force Kenny to go. Then fight it out for the leadership like men. They are both privileged men too, and won’t go hungry if they lose.