Whispering Kevin sounds loud and clear before listening MEPs

WHISPERING KEVIN Cardiff had no trouble making himself heard in Brussels on Wednesday.

Perhaps he might have been better off giving his cagey audience of MEPs a taste of the sotto vocetreatment he routinely dispenses during meetings in Dublin.

They mightn’t have given him the brush-off when he looked for a big job in the European Court of Auditors.

“Kevin has an annoying habit of speaking sometimes in a very low voice, and at other times, when you’re trying really hard to listen, he starts muttering,” a number cruncher who has seen him in action told us yesterday.

Now that he has one leg in one job and one leg in another, Mr Cardiff might currently be described as the secretary general of the Department of Financial Limbo.

However, when he was still head honcho in Merrion Street and attending inter-departmental meetings, his habit of dropping his voice so low that fellow mandarins could barely hear him was a source of wonder.

But when he was before the EU budgetary committee, observers report “he came across clearly and demonstrated a refreshing level of candour”. It didn’t do him much good, though.

Last July, the secretary general appeared before the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee to answer questions about the bank guarantee.

Former Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen was committee chairman. He hadn’t the foggiest what Whispering Kevin was going on about.

“While I don’t intend to be offensive, I am having difficulty in hearing what Mr Cardiff is saying,” said Bernard, ever the polite Corkonian.

“I’m sorry,” said Kevin.

“It’s the microphone,” remarked Fianna Fáil’s kindly Seán Fleming.

Then the secretary general confirmed what many of his colleagues already knew: “No, I tend to mutter. It works in smaller meetings because people lean forward and pretend they are listening but in this meeting, it does not.”

“Right,” said the chairman, glad to have cleared that one up. “I’d fall out of the desk, were I to lean forward any further.”

But Labour’s Pat Rabbitte was rather impressed by Whispering Kevin’s strategy.

“That is a useful quality,” he mused.

So if you have occasion to attend a meeting with the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and he starts to mutter in a barely audible manner, you know where he learned that trick.

Then again, Pat Rabbitte could never be barely audible. Never. The effort would kill him.