For the first time in a long time, the smiley Mayo head of Enda Kenny adorned the front page of Thursday’s The Irish Times, as the former taoiseach received what is surely an overdue honorary doctorate from DCU. Kenny, a youthful 74, looks like a man who is enjoying a good retirement. It’s fair to say he earned it – a TD for 45 years, twice taoiseach, he was Fine Gael‘s most successful-ever leader and led one of the most consequential governments in the country’s history. Here are five lessons for politics and politicians from the life and times of Enda.
1: Stick at it
Kenny’s rise through the ranks was hardly meteoric. Elected a TD in a 1975 byelection caused by the death of his father, he became a junior minister after 11 years in the Dáil and a cabinet minister after 20. He ran for the leadership of his party unsuccessfully in 2001. It was only after Fine Gael was massacred at the 2002 election that Kenny finally secured the top job. With Bertie Ahern in his pomp, leading Fine Gael was a daunting task. But Kenny slaved away and rebuilt the party, leading it to the brink of power eight years later in the wake of the financial crash. He still had to withstand a challenge to his leadership from within the party, in 2010, just months before he would win the general election (an episode that demonstrated Fine Gael’s then entertaining habit of trying to knife its own leader). Kenny beat off the challenge – testament to his grit, resilience and general bouncebackability. They’re vital qualities for any would-be leader.
2: Get the right people
Kenny was able to beat back the 2010 challenge largely due to the help of Phil Hogan, his enforcer in the party. Hogan would later be Kenny’s nominee as European Commissioner, a gig regarded as probably the biggest plum in the political orchard. Reconstituting his front bench afterwards, Kenny brought back as finance spokesman the former party leader Michael Noonan, who would go on to play an indispensable role in the Fine Gael-Labour government. Kenny also resisted the temptation to exile the plotters, and so Richard Bruton, Leo Varadkar, Lucinda Creighton, Brian Hayes and Simon Coveney would all go on to play roles in government. Kenny surrounded himself with a group of able, hardworking and completely loyal staff and advisers – Andrew McDowell, Ciaran Conlon, Feargal Purcell, Mark Kenneally, Mark Mortell and others – who were central to his achievements.
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3: And get on with them
Kenny is a nice man – and most people who meet him like him. That doesn’t mean he isn’t tough – you have to be tough to be taoiseach – but he made an effort to get on with people. In private, Kenny’s staff at all levels speak warmly of him, even when they are acknowledging his mistakes or political failings. They like him. Even when the 2011-16 government, amid the depths of the bailout, was under the most extreme pressure as it implemented the Troika-mandated austerity programme, Kenny kept relations with his Labour counterpart Eamon Gilmore mostly on an even keel and kept a sense of coherence in his cabinet. He is by nature gregarious, but he had to work at leadership, too.
4: Beware the easy option
Most political decisions are not straightforward choices between the good option and the bad. Rather, they are choices between which is the lesser of two evils. In 2011, Kenny faced the question of whether Ireland should default on the gargantuan debts the banks had run up and which had been transferred to the State.
Default was the option favoured by many politicians contemplating the alternative of years of austerity to fix the public finances. Gerry Adams said he would tell the IMF to go home and take their money with them. The Sunday Independent found itself in rare agreement with Adams: “Default! Say the People!” shouted one front page. Some economists thought the debts were so huge that Ireland would end up defaulting anyway and might as well get it over with.
Repaying the bailout was certainly painful and there are very legitimate arguments about how the burden was spread across society in tax increases, cuts to public spending and pay cuts. But on its own terms at least, the approach worked – as the public finances were fixed, the economy bounced back with astonishing vigour.
Defaulting would have shut Ireland out from the bond markets, meaning that the gap between what Ireland was raising in taxes and spending on running the State would have needed to be closed overnight. That would have required adjustments of about one third of the total government budget, or €19 billion. But yeah, default, say the people.
Kenny and his government did the wise and difficult thing. It turned out to be unpopular. But does anyone seriously now believe we should have defaulted in 2011?
5: Don’t expect to be thanked
Of course, the years of austerity were tough – and many of the measures were enormously unpopular. Fine Gael unwisely asked people to “keep the recovery going” in the 2016 election, when many people weren’t feeling any recovery at all – and got monstered by voters. Labour dumped its leader in a panic in 2014 but still lost nearly all its seats in 2016, and spent the next political cycle apologising in opposition for what it did in government. That did not turn out to be a wise tactic either.
However you look at it, the Fine Gael-Labour government – albeit at great social and economic cost – restored the country’s fortunes. That looked unlikely in 2011. Maybe virtue is its own reward. So the final lesson from Enda? Even when you get things right, don’t expect to be thanked.
