Enda Kenny, at a loose end since retirement, has been roaming from town to town doing a bit of off-the-books taoiseaching. He could bicycle up your lane any day now offering to taoiseach for a nice pie or a space to rest his weary head or a plot to bury his huge retirement pot.
“Don’t I know you?” you’ll say, bringing him a cup of tea as he taoiseachs away in your yard.
“That was another life,” Enda will say, wistfully, while looking out to sea. “I was a different man then.”
The title, I believe, means Good Man Yourself, Enda, though my Irish is really bad because of colonialism, so I should probably watch again and read the subtitles
I've gathered all this from watching Iarnród Enda (Monday, RTÉ One), an Irish-language documentary series in which he wanders the west by bike. The title, I believe, means Good Man Yourself, Enda, though my Irish is really bad because of colonialism, so I should probably watch again and read the subtitles.
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Okay, fresh start: Iarnród Enda is a programme in which Enda Kenny, a taoiseach by trade, cycles along old railway lines, presumably as a massive troll to Fianna Fáil, under whose stewardship these railway lines were decommissioned. Iarnród Enda is Irish for the Little Enda that Could.
Kenny looks well in retirement, his face ruddy, his rusty locks flowing in the sea wind, his shoulders anoraked, his legs clad in the most casual of bluejeans (one word). He looks more like a former member of Planxty than a former Fine Gael leader, notably forgoing that party's traditional costume of chinos, loafers, wax jacket and the Economist magazine.
I hate to sexualise former taoisigh, but, unlike with the others, I can imagine that, as last orders are called, there are people who would lob the gob in his direction. (Maybe I’d throw John A Costello in that category, too, if only for the sassy way he left the Commonwealth.)
Enda is so understated in his approach that he often looks like he's wandered into shot by mistake, though, in fairness, this was also his leadership style
Enda is so understated in his approach that he often looks like he’s wandered into shot by mistake, though, in fairness, this was also his leadership style. He always seemed like he’d achieved high office accidentally, like King Ralph or the gardener in Being There, by wandering into the wrong room or winning a raffle.
This isn't a criticism. This arguably makes him one of the best taoisigh. For contrast, take another taoiseach-helmed documentary series from the olden days, Charles Haughey's Ireland. (They get documentary gigs along with their pension pots, I think.) This begins with Charles J Haughey boasting about how his love of Irish heritage was inspired by owning a chunk of it, before parking his huge boat at the Blasket island he had recently purchased.
This is not a joke. This really happened, and apparently as a nation we were fine with it. My point is, bearing in mind our national addiction to conservative governance and comparing him with some of the theocrats, economy-ruiners and minor Batman villains who have run this country, Enda’s not the worst.
In this week's episode he follows the old West Clare Railway by bike from Ennis to Kilkee as fiddles play and overhead drone shots remind us how amazing Ireland looks when it wants to. He visits the county museum where he dons white gloves like Mickey Mouse, and the historian Michael McCaughan shows him the inscribed silver shovel with which Charles Stewart Parnell dug the first sod in the 1880s.
Haughey would have just taken that shovel. “This is mine now,” he would have said, before climbing a rope ladder to a gold-plated helicopter filled with oil paintings and fine wine. Enda just stands there as though trying to comprehend a complicated document about trade tariffs.
Horrific things happen in each episode of Call the Midwife, but these things are leavened by the kindness and warmth of the characters. Every episode I've seen has made me cry
Before long he's on his way again, turning up to listen to the lovely traditional music of Tara and Martin Breen at a converted railway station at Ruan and then to hear some more tales of olden days trains at another in Corofin. Then he rocks up at the homestead of his fellow retired politician Tony Killeen. For a moment I think (I hope) he's getting the old gang together for a heist or a spot of guerrilla governing.
"I need some muscle for a job, Killeen."
"I'm a Fianna Fáil man, Kenny!"
"But we're not so different you and I …" (They're basically the same party now, in fact.)
In actuality they just talk about trains.
There's more. Kenny visits the site of the IRA ambush at Rineen, gets to go on a steam train with a man who looks like Santy, and encounters Marty Morrissey, a magical being who holds dominion over everything west of the Shannon.
It’s all quite charming if not earth-shattering. Kenny doesn’t project the strong sense of authorial perspective you might like from a documentary like this, but the music is good, the landscape is beautiful and the historical detail is diverting. Like his premiership, it could have been worse.
I don't understand why some people think Call the Midwife (Sunday, BBC One) is cosy and escapist. Beneath the twinkly pianos and swooping string sections, it deals with both the challenging realities of childbirth and the misery of mid-20th-century poverty. With a light touch it tackles prejudice, classism and misogyny as dark events such as the Thalidomide scandal loom in the background.
Horrific things happen in each episode of Call the Midwife, but these things are leavened by the kindness and warmth of the characters. Those who dismiss the show want to watch gritty, morally compromised shitheads, I suppose, but I’m tired of that. All I know is that every episode I’ve seen of Call the Midwife has managed to make me cry.
The 10th series starts with midwives of Nonnatus House having to work with a private hospital in order to continue funding their work with the poor. This newfound private-sector input is probably not down to the Tory party’s dishonest obsession with “bias” at the BBC. “Why not represent everything that sociopathic capitalists have done for society?” I imagine them saying. “Stop showcasing lived reality’s terrible left-wing bias.”
I'm heartened by the way the exasperated Dr Turner (Stephen McGann) says, with passion, "The National Health should be capable of keeping its promise of protecting people from the cradle to the grave." Yes, Call the Midwife valorises socialised medicine in a manner that would be written off as communist propaganda if it weren't disguised as period froth. Fight on, comrades.
