Enda Kenny: A 40-year political journey

For 41 years, Enda Kenny has been a member of the Dáil. From playboy backbencher to Taoiseach in the age of austerity, from a well-liked but little regarded rural TD to a hard-as-nails political operator whose still sunny smile belies a cold and calculating political ruthlessness, it has been quite a journey of transformation.

He has spent almost his whole adult life in politics, rising to the pinnacle of power in Ireland through a mixture of perseverance, toughness, political skill and luck.

Now the clock is ticking on what is almost certainly the last active phase in his political career. The budget is done; abortion has been shelved as a political issue until next year. The shaky Coalition Government has stabilised, at least for now. The challenges of Brexit loom large, but Enda Kenny’s restive party is already looking beyond him.

He says he will serve out the full term, but he has to say that. Nobody believes him and he knows that nobody believes him. He says he will stand again in Mayo, but you'd wonder about that, too. This valedictory act in his career may be long or short, but we are surely in the autumn of the Kenny era. And politics, being a brutal enough game, tends to accelerate towards its unsentimental inevitabilities.

So how should we judge him, our most unregarded Taoiseach?

Kenny has outperformed the expectations of many in the job, displaying an even but steely mien, leading one Government through the greatest economic challenges ever encountered in this country, and then returning to pull together another unlikely administration.

If you had said of him when he took over that he would lead the country out of the bailout, oversee a strong economic recovery and win a second term as Taoiseach, you might reasonably have expected that he would be universally hailed as his party’s greatest ever leader and the saviour of his country.

But that’s hardly the case, is it?

He has legions of critics, many of them in his own party. Even in this iconoclastic age, it is hard to think of a politician who has attracted such media disdain, and public hostility. Even when resolute majorities of voters declared that they believed the country was going in the right direction, they gave little credit for that to Enda. His rejection by the voters at the last election was pretty spectacular. A lot of the country just doesn’t buy Enda, and they never have, really.

Doubts

The doubts of some and the low opinion of others about Kenny aren’t plucked out of thin air. His grasp of policy is often sketchy. He is as capable of political strokes as any Fianna Fáiler ever was. Media scrutiny has not been his friend.

The great promise of political change – remember the “Democratic Revolution?” – has largely gone unfulfilled. If our politics is different now, it is because Kenny didn’t win a majority, not because he did.

The recovery he oversaw and promoted was spectacular but uneven, and too many people feel that it has left them behind. The austerity that preceded it was severe and destructive. Child poverty, however imperfectly measured, soared. The people who depend most on the State were the ones who were hardest hit. True, those who decried it were a lot more numerous than those offering realistic alternatives, but there is still a case to answer.

Less substantially but more entertainingly, he has said some quite ridiculous things. He has a store of unlikely anecdotes which bolster his political positions – men with two pints in their hands, central bankers calling for the Army to be called out to mind the cash machines, taxpayers ringing the Department of the Taoiseach to express their gratitude, and so on.

His contention that the Seanad should be abolished because it did nothing to warn about the impending economic crisis does not stand up to a great deal of scrutiny. He could equally have proposed abolishing the Dáil, or indeed himself, by that measure.

And yet, and yet. When Kenny departs from office, he will leave his country in an undeniably better position than when he inherited its leadership. Perhaps that, ultimately, is what history will consider important.

Most assessments of Kenny tend towards the “paradox” or “enigma” variety. But really, there is no Kenny enigma. There is no mystery to his political alchemy. There is, however, a lot of on-the-one hand, on-the-other.

Kenny polarises opinions, but often does not contradict them. He can be hopelessly cack-handed at times. But he also steered the country through some if its darkest days. He did not change our politics at a time when there was a deep appetite for a change. But he restored many of the good things our deeply flawed politics had nevertheless managed to deliver for the Irish people. It’s not that it’s complicated. It’s just mixed.

Kenny is a naturally conservative politician but he realised he was living in a time of change, and he adapted to that.

His political instincts are, and have always been, underestimated. He has been supremely pliable, adapting himself to circumstances rather than changing them.

In a political culture that demands politicians do the bidding of voters, Kenny has always sought to deliver what they wanted. That is why he has been a successful politician.

Kenny did not rise inexorably to power, defining an era, or bending politics to his will, like some of his predecessors. No one ever said, in the first quarter-century of his political career: You watch Enda – he will be Taoiseach some day. The iron entered his soul sometime in the late 1990s, after he had been a minister in the rainbow government led by John Bruton. It was then that his political ambitions took shape. His close friends say his wife Fionnuala, a former aide of Charles Haughey's, was central to that process.

Smart and tough

He became Taoiseach because he was smart enough and tough enough to stay standing long enough while all his rivals – inside and outside his party – fell away. And he remained in office for much the same reason.

His temperament has been exceptional, and temperament is vital in the job. Being Taoiseach is unlike any other job in government or outside of it. In the course of a day, Kenny may have to chair a Cabinet meeting which reaches decisions that will affect people's lives for decades, answer questions in the Dáil on a controversy he knows nothing about, smooth the divisions in a fractious party, speak to the president of the European Council about Brexit by telephone and greet the president of Cyprus. If you think anyone could do it, look at how the job crushed Brian Cowen.

If anything, he seems more relaxed about it now. He no longer fears the media as he once did; last Thursday he happily answered journalists’ questions in one of his now semi-regular briefings, even if he didn’t say all that much. That, of course, is part of the skill required. Perhaps he no longer cares as much what we think.

His workrate remains positively Stakhanovite, the demeanour as sunny as ever. He is well capable of delivering blistering criticisms in private, but in general he remains an extremely good humoured man.

His good humour will be tested in the months ahead. Many in his party now believe that his main project is to remain as long as possible, and they bristle about that. “Why should my political career be cut short to give Enda Kenny a few more months? The longer he stays, the worse it will be for us,” rails one.

There are people in Fine Gael who now think about little else, and it is the subject to which all political conversations turn before long. The campaign to succeed him becomes less subterranean by the day.

His allies want to him to leave in his own time. But they don’t want that to last too long, either.

If he waits too long, they will come for him, and he knows it. No one understands the Darwinian truths of politics more than he does.

Over 41 years, he has seen it all before.

A major two-part documentary on the career of Enda Kenny , written and presented by Irish Times Deputy Political Editor Pat Leahy, will air on Monday, October 31stand Tuesday, November 1st, 9.35pm on RTÉ One