So they gave Enda Kenny another award last week. Again the speeches about how he saved Ireland, and turned the economy around. Not a bad word said about him to the extent that you have to check if the old dame is still alive. Here are some sobering facts for his band of cheerleaders.
During Enda’s first term as taoiseach homelessness increased 81 per cent. It literally doubled for the homeless aged 18-24 even though he arrived into office three years after the crash.
Here’s another: under his leadership he oversaw the largest transfer of property ownership since the Land League. You don’t need reminding that the new owners were mainly tax-avoiding global venture capitalists. You surely don’t need reminding who the dispossessed were either. Imagine what Mayo’s Michael Davitt might say? The week his fellow county man was named European of the Year.
We had to swallow more platitudes about his economic genius. However, isn’t this the same man who seemed to have such a poor grasp of economic matters in the 2007 election that he lost an open-goal contest against tribunal-mired Bertie?
And again when pressed on the 2016 trail didn’t seem to understand basic economic terms, batting away questions about fiscal policy as “jargon”. We don’t know if he was any better in 2011 because he physically didn’t even show up to some debates.
He avoided difficult interviews in his tenure, and is the only taoiseach in the 56-year history of the Late Late Show not to appear on the programme.
Patience
So what was Enda’s great economic miracle?
He implemented a plan that was enforced upon the previous Fianna Fáil-led coalition by the troika. That was all, following the same EC/ECB/IMF instructions to the letter because he had little choice. The Irish people did the hard part, restoring the country’s finances by emigrating, suffering and by that great euphemism patience. In other words only rarely taking to the streets, and enduring controversy after controversy with reticence, keeping even its disquiet at the ballot box to a conservative murmur of dissent.
Other than the economy can we really claim Kenny left health, housing, faith in the Garda, water services and politics in better nick?
At one point there were 15 separate issues before a commission of investigation, inquiry or tribunal.
Today the country has a national debt of €200 billion, and regardless of how bad that gets his salary of a future six-figure pension will never miss a payment. Some heroic sacrifice. When the next election is called he will be entitled to a lump sum of €378,000. Surely that’s award enough for a lifetime of public service?
What is it about leaving big offices that these men need honours and awards to supplement generous tax-funded handouts?
Kenny was inducted into the Order of Innisfallen (which recognises contributions made to the area’s economy by people from outside Killarney), he was given the TK Whitaker Award and an NUI honorary degree. The latter is untainted by the irony of Kenny having lanced money from higher education throughout his tenure. The award itself is lessened somewhat by the fact that it is automatically bestowed on retiring taoisigh. You could be the most unpopular taoiseach in living memory and still get one. Just ask Brian Cowen.
Great speeches
Accepting these trophies, Kenny gave speeches, great speeches, teary-eyed and folksy as ever. Men with two awards in their hand, poetry, guff like that.
There were no reminders that Kenny didn’t retire last year because he wanted to get out at the peak of his career. He didn’t regale the audiences of how he stepped aside amid the passive aggression of his party that simmered after his disastrous 2016 general election.
His authority was whittled away to nothing even before he sealed his fate by giving wrong information about his contacts with Minister for Children Katherine Zappone regarding her meeting with Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe.
By then it is worth remembering that Kenny’s approval rating had slumped to an eye-watering 27 per cent. To put that in context, Trump’s worst rating to date has been 35 per cent, a figure considered woeful.
So, cheerleaders, remember Kenny was forced to retire after a sequence of gaffes and almost universal unpopularity with every demographic.
The unfortunate thing about his European of the Year award is that it sounds global but is just a local honour. The lesser-spotted European Movement Ireland decided to give him the trophy, and its president is…wait for it…Leo Varadkar.
Spin team
Part of the praise this week included old claims about how Kenny was highly respected in Brussels. His spin team once warned that he might leave at a minute’s notice to take a big job in Europe. That’s how well got he was among the big guns on the Continent.
Well, he’s been free now to take up those big job offers for over a year. Yet no one has come calling for Kenny as far as we can see. They haven’t even given him an award. No one even mentions him over there any more. Funny that. Instead the poor auld former taoiseach is left languishing in the Dáil, forgotten but not gone, busy filling his mantelpiece with a vanity collection of trinkets. Still, at least he has a home to go to.