FINE GAEL'S WEEK OF TURMOIL:THERE WAS no fanfare for Enda Kenny when he returned home to Mayo last night a day after securing his leadership of Fine Gael. There had been talk of bonfires, but yesterday Mr Kenny's confidante Paddy McGuinness was not out collecting firewood as he had promised. Instead, he was out tackling the 22-mile Bangor trail.
The route across the Nephin Beg mountain range to Newport is no dawdle."You could find yourself dodging a bog hole, climbing over rocks . . . a great way to clear a head," he told The Irish Times, before reaching Newport.
And he was in company. “There were 21 of us after the phone-around – even some Fianna Fáilers, and mostly people who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Enda in 2003,” McGuinness said. “We thought it was the best way to celebrate Thursday’s result, never mind clear the head.”
By then, the word was out in the constituency that Kenny didn’t want a hero’s return. That famous “Up Mayo” shout of delight from Councillor Joe Mellett, captured by television cameras in Dublin after the leadership vote, and the images transmitted on evening news bulletins from Castlebar, had not gone down well in certain party quarters.
“We looked like a bunch of Fianna Fáil Flynn-stones,” one Fine Gael supporter confided, wincing at the shots of champagne flowing outside Kenny’s Tucker Street office.
And so, although there had been a provisional arrangement to book the “TF” (Traveller’s Friend) in Castlebar, the word went out that Mr Kenny would be in meetings all day in Dublin, and would return home quietly to his wife Fionnuala and family.
His second son, Ferdia, had been doing his Junior Cert. “His father hasn’t seen him all week,” another supporter explained. “And can you imagine the week that that kid has had?”
“It is business as usual for Enda,” Castlebar town councillor and prospective mayor Ger Deere, said, when asked if this had been Mr Kenny’s explicit instruction. “Our family had a row, but we’ve sorted it, and there has been a good end to it all. We have to get on with the business of being in opposition. I knew myself Enda wouldn’t have wanted a big welcome in the circumstances.”
Richard Bruton was no longer the name on many lips; rather the “traitor” was identified as Roscommon-South Leitrim TD Denis Naughten, who had played a prominent role in supporting the alternative leadership bid.
Mr Naughten was forced to explain he had “not turned his back on the west of Ireland” in an interview with Tommy Marren on MidWest Radio. “Politics isn’t a football match, it’s about people’s lives,” the TD said. He had backed Kenny in two separate leadership contests, he pointed out..
“I never argued Enda Kenny should be elected taoiseach because he is from the west of Ireland,” Mr Naughten said. “I always argued that he should be elected because I felt he was the best man for the job . . . What people had seen this week is a different side of Enda Kenny – someone that is determined . . . ruthless and someone that is made of steel . . .”
This was what the public needed to see, in McGuinness’s view.“The mood now is one of relief and joy, not triumphalism,” he said, as if he bid it would be so.
"Richard Bruton is a man of great ability," he added. "Any party needs to use those talents . . . Whether Richard Bruton would be willing is another thing." And, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather II, keeping one's friends close, but enemies closer, may be no bad strategy after all.