How Enda Kenny blew it

For those who aspire to political leadership, there is usually a moment of truth. Enda Kenny's came on October 3rd last year. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was on the rack over the revelations that he had received payments from private individuals while he was minister for finance. The proceedings were live on television, and many people whose interest in political drama is in direct proportion to the degree to which it resembles a blood sport had tuned in.

It was a moment of the kind that, during the political crises of the early 1990s, had turned Mary Harney and Dick Spring into figures of real political stature. It was Enda Kenny's big chance to prove himself a smart, authoritative, lucid leader. He blew it big time.

He started reasonably well: "This is a bad day for accountability, the body politic and the Progressive Democrats. It is a good day for cynicism and hypocrisy." And then he was knocked completely out of his stride by a harmless bit of heckling. The Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, interjected: "It is a very important day for the deputy."

At this statement of the obvious, Enda Kenny lost his cool, his gravitas and his big chance. He was transformed, like Cinderella at midnight, from potential princess to political pumpkin. He started to throw shapes, like a young fella who has just been turned away from a nightclub for wearing trainers and starts railing at the bouncer as his friends lead him away: "The Minister, Deputy Roche, will get his comeuppance one of these days. He will get his comeuppance. He is probably the nastiest bit of goods of them all."

For those watching on television, the scene was even more bizarre than it must have been in the Dáil chamber. As Enda Kenny ought to have known after 31 years in the Dáil, Dick Roche's comment was not audible to the TV audience, so the outburst seemed merely surreal. The pressure on the Taoiseach was lifted and he waltzed away from a potentially terminal crisis. The next day, RTÉ's Liveline, usually a good barometer of the public mood, was all about Enda Kenny's attack on Dick Roche.

It may be cruelly unfair to judge a leader on a single moment, but incidents like this aren't really about one episode. The big moments turn on preconceptions, which are either re-enforced or overturned. The preconception about Enda Kenny was that he is a bit lightweight, that he rose without trace through a quarter of a century as a professional politician, that he is no match for the wily Bertie. His implosion, in the first moment when he really had the full attention of the politically literate public, set those preconceptions in stone. And nothing that has happened since has forced anyone to think again.

The perception that Enda really isn't up to it is the lumbering elephant in the claustrophobic room of Irish politics. Its presence was vaguely indicated last week by the fatuous noises-off emanating from John Deasy, but no one in Fine Gael (or in Labour, for that matter) seems willing to state the obvious. The reasons are clear enough: Enda Kenny is a very likeable man; he has been an excellent party organiser, and an election is at most five months away. But the cost of the silence is pretty big: 15 years of Fianna Fáil/ Progressive Democrats government.

It is not as if the problem will fix itself on its own. Yesterday morning, for example, Enda Kenny was in the Irish Independent and on Morning Ireland, highlighting what for him is obviously a big issue. Not the drift into a deeply unequal society, or the revelation that most of those applying to Dublin City Council for affordable housing are actually too poor to qualify, or the crisis in care for the elderly, or the fact that the St Vincent de Paul Society is paying for children to have psychological assessments, or any of the other national scandals, but the need for a second airport in Dublin.

Not only was it the wrong issue but his whole argument was based on a false premise (that Dublin airport will be at full capacity as soon as the second terminal is built).

And did it occur to him that there might be a problem with simultaneously wooing the Green Party and planning for an exponential increase in air travel? Yet this kind of campaigning - based on micro-issues rather than on fundamentals - seems to be a strategy developed by Fine Gael to distract from its leader's inability to say much about the big choices facing the country.

In a painfully revealing interview with Mark Hennessy in Friday's Irish Times, Enda Kenny preened himself on getting good focus-group reactions to his stances on issues such as the statutory rape controversy and the age of consent. He added, damningly: "It is not easy to have the same sense of outrage and passion about economics, or whatever else."

If you can't feel passion and outrage about social and economic justice, how are you going to offer voters a real choice?