I am big enough to own up when I am wrong. Last week, I suggested that Enda Kenny's speech to the Fine Gael Ardfheis had been full of vacuous posturing and that the party was failing to engage in an adult conversation with the electorate.
In the light of responses to the column from the party's director of elections Frank Flannery and justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe, I am happy to admit that my column was seriously misleading.
The speech was not as bad as I claimed it was. It was much, much worse.
A party ardfheis is a bit like a circus. When the circus comes to town, and the elephant walks down Main Street, there are usually a few men in brown coats with buckets and shovels, discreetly cleaning up after the parade.
In this case, Frank Flannery and Jim O'Keeffe are armed simply with denial. There was no elephant. That mess on the road has nothing to do with us.
This comes down to three issues:
1: The medical treatment of drunks. On the Right Hook show on Newstalk 106 last week, Frank Flannery insisted that it was simply wrong to say that Enda Kenny was proposing to deny hospital treatment to drunken people with acute conditions. The party, apparently, has no such policy. Why then did Enda Kenny tell the ardfheis that his first concrete proposal to tackle the A&E crisis is to "get the drunks out of A&E. Put the weekend warriors into drunk tanks"?
2: A taoiseach deciding to electronically tag people who have been granted bail by the courts. I pointed out that this was unconstitutional: "politicians can't impose criminal sanctions like tagging". Jim O'Keeffe, in a letter published last Thursday, replied that "There was never any suggestion that politicians would be doing so. The Fine Gael policy, as stated by Deputy Kenny last Saturday evening, was to introduce new legislation to authorise the judge to electronically tag someone as a condition of bail." In fact, though, there was a very definite suggestion that a specific politician - Enda Kenny himself - rather than a judge will authorise the tagging of specific people. He did say that he would introduce legislation to "make it tougher for anyone accused of a serious crime to get bail" - a legitimate proposal, within the jurisdiction of a government. But he went on (the italics are mine): "And if they do get bail, I will authorise that that person be electronically tagged."
If he meant what Jim O'Keeffe claims he meant, he would have said: "I will propose legislation to gives judges the power to tag people to whom they grant bail."
Instead, he said that he personally as taoiseach will authorise the tagging of specific people - "that person". If his words had any meaning at all, he was proposing a measure that his own justice spokesman acknowledges to be unconstitutional.
3: The courts imposing criminal sanctions on people who have not been tried. This is, arguably, a finer legal point. Jim O'Keeffe writes that it is simply wrong to suggest that even the courts could not impose criminal sanctions on people who have yet to be tried. He cites the denial of bail itself, or the imposition of conditions for bail, as "criminal sanctions" that are routinely enforced.
But this misses two important points. Firstly, the denial of bail is not intended as a criminal sanction. It is intended to prevent an accused person from interfering with his or her trial or from committing a serious offence while awaiting trail. Secondly, Enda Kenny's proposal relates to people who have actually been granted bail by the courts. The courts would therefore have ruled that these people are not likely to interfere with the trial or to commit a serious crime. The constitutionality of imposing criminal sanctions on innocent people in these circumstances must be, at best, highly dubious.
What all of this amounts to is that Enda Kenny wasn't posturing about Fine Gael policies. He was posturing about policies that Fine Gael says it doesn't have.
So when he said he would "get the drunks out of A&E" or "I will authorise that that person be electronically tagged", he was engaging in pure rhetorical artifice. He didn't mean it, it isn't true, and he doesn't expect anyone to take him seriously. What a wonderful way to assert your authority as a would-be taoiseach.
The underlying issue is this: if Enda Kenny is to become taoiseach, he has to convince people who are broadly on the Left to express, through their transfers, a preference for him over a Bertie Ahern who has been cleverly proclaiming his socialism.
The task is enormous: by next year, it will be 25 years since a Fine Gael-Labour coalition actually won a general election. It was able to do so because Left-leaning voters regarded Garret FitzGerald's Fine Gael as more liberal and socially progressive than Charles Haughey's Fianna Fáil. If he is to have any chance of repeating the feat, Enda Kenny needs to be talking to those voters rather than retreating into a "law and order party" brand that is as bogus as it is hackneyed.