The leader's address at a party conference is not a time for specifics. It's a time for galvanising the heart, reminding the faithful why they fell in love in the first place and - with any luck - wooing back old flames, writes Kathy Sheridan.
On the face of it, much of Enda Kenny's address could be dismissed as a statement of the bleedin' heart obvious: a crisply-worded, well-delivered precis of every gripe ever aired in every column, chat show and letters page, against the Government. It ranged from finger-flashing thugs to the Luas; from clapped-out school prefabs to isolated old people; from dilapidated hospitals to the price of childcare; from the cost of living to housing lists; from isolated old people to the iniquities of Hanly.
In short, Fine Gael is keen on law 'n' order, first-class education systems, a hospital on every corner, open government, decent people, family, motherhood and apple pie. Ho hum.
And yet, this listener and her companions did not tune out. That's because in Kenny's first sentence, he brought up the magic word. Trust. "Trust. where politics begins and ends," he said.
And every other sphere of life too, he might have added.
If this implies a certain naïvete on our part, then so be it. I prefer to think of it as sound realism, a reflection of the times we live in that we registered that one word and grappled with it, dissecting its meaning, mocking the believers while aching to believe. It helped that he looked and sounded believable.
We reserved judgment, however. It would have helped some more if he had followed up with a humble little recital of past sins, as an earnest of future compliance with this daring new pact between party and electorate. We wanted blinding assurances that he knows what precisely constitutes trust.
The kind of thing we're thinking of is, say, the time a FG predecessor gave a reply that was less than truthful to a Dáil question. The explanation for this economy with the truth? He wasn't asked "the right question".
It hardly ranks as the slyest political statement of the past 10 years, not by a long shot, but if any single sentence could encapsulate the disengagement of politician from voter in the seat of democracy that is Dáil Éireann, this is it.
It feeds every negative stereotype about politicians. Glib, cynical, shameless, demonstrating a willingness to play games with the truth - the truth that belongs to the people of this democracy, the people to whom politicians are accountable and are paid to represent. How such a disengagement can continue to occur in a small island culture which prides itself mightily on intimate, daily cultivation of the grass roots is a mystery.
In a country where the Taoiseach famously knocks on constituents' doors on a Saturday morning, startling the natives with his solicitous enquiries, and where TDs fulminate about the forced surrender of their local authority seats on the grounds that these positions render vital local insights, it beggars belief.
We've had further manifestations this week of ministers and deputies who - to quote Michael Ring - are tigers in their constituencies and "little mouseens" where it matters. Public disaffection must be head-butting them at this stage.
At the heart of the anger among average wage earners is a sense of being taken for fools. People will submit willingly to astounding levels of pain if persuaded they are part of a common enterprise where the suffering is shared equally and transparently, from the top down. But no such respectful discourse has taken place. No lessons have been learned from the election fiasco when trust was lost, perhaps irreparably.
In the classic ploy, expectations are still "managed" coming up to Budget time. A trickle of leaks ensure that people are conditioned to expect the worst and are then weak with gratitude at being "spared", relatively speaking, regardless of the fall-out for the less fortunate.
Government ministers continue stoutly to defend benchmarking as a concept, too disengaged to notice that it is the insultingly deliberate secrecy of the process that irks objectors, as much as the billions involved.
When anti-bin charge campaigners described themselves - to much political derision - as the "highest taxed people in Europe", they did not mean income tax; they meant stealth taxes, as in taxes imposed by stealth. Each new "tax", each new electricity/bus fare/A&E/prescription hike is perceived as another con job, another way of hustling money out of the powerless, while the Government wallows in the kudos of managing a "low tax" economy and urges people to shop around.
Vast sums are being spent on tribunals designed to shrive the political landscape and restore trust and engagement with the electorate. Yet, the effects of this continuous, relentless hucksterism on civic-mindedness are as insidious as any brown envelope. Creeping mé féin-ism is the least of it.
Enda Kenny caught our attention. Now let's see what he can do with it.