FG leader acted in a courageous, decisive manner to see off heave against him, writes NOEL WHELAN
IN AUGUST 2002, just weeks after he was elected leader of Fine Gael, Enda Kenny addressed the final Friday session of the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal. It was almost 10pm before he delivered a good, well-written and timely speech touching on a range of social concerns.
What Kenny delivered was solid rather than spectacular. The audience was large and most were receptive. A local Fine Gael telephone campaign ensured that party members supplemented the summer school throng and added to the warmth of the reception for their new leader.
During the chairman’s introduction, it emerged that Kenny made particular efforts to ensure he kept his Glenties speaking engagement. He had been in Wexford that morning for the funeral of the victims of a boating tragedy, flew from Waterford to Mayo for a mid-afternoon engagement and was then driven to Donegal.
Privately, a member of Kenny’s entourage later confided that the most noticeable thing that Kenny brought to the Fine Gael leadership was energy. Unlike some of his predecessors, he enjoyed crisis-crossing the country and meeting people. He was as lively in the evening as at early-morning meetings. It was clear that, while he might not have “electrified” the party as he once promised, Enda Kenny was bringing a surge of activity to Fine Gael.
Within two years, Kenny and his backroom team overhauled the party’s morale and its election machine. Fine Gael’s results in the 2004 local and European elections were impressive, defying overly dramatic and confident predictions of the party’s demise in the wake of the 2002 general election debacle.
Those within and outside Fine Gael who in recent months thought that Kenny would fall if pushed failed to appreciate the effort he has put in over the last eight years. The man who so often in the initial bleak years of the Fine Gael revival project left his Castlebar home in the early morning to tour the country wasn’t going to let his chance slip now when he is so close to getting into Government Buildings.
Having surrendered so much personal and family time to rebuilding Fine Gael, there was no way Kenny was going to let Richard Bruton steal the prize on the last lap without a fight.
In this fight, Kenny and his team outthought, outmanoeuvred and outperformed their opponents. While much was made of the inopportune timing, there is never a good time to take on a party leader. It was errors of strategy rather than timing that did for Richard Bruton. Underestimating Kenny’s resolve was Bruton’s first strategic mistake. Relying on frontbenchers and patronising the wider parliamentary party was his second. Bruton was also wrong to assume that being the media darling would operate to his benefit within the party.
Kenny’s decision to confront Bruton before Bruton came at him took the momentum away from the challenger. Sacking his deputy leader and then denouncing and dissolving the frontbench showed courage. By putting down his own motion of confidence, Kenny set the question on his terms.
The abandonment of the Fine Gael frontbench meeting on Tuesday was reminiscent of how Charles Haughey bought himself time during one heave in 1983 when he arranged for a key parliamentary party meeting to be adjourned once condolences were offered on the death of Clem Coughlan. Indeed, Kenny’s strategy this week was out of the Haughey playbook. He is fortunate to have access at home to advice from someone with considerable experience of those tumultuous times in Fianna Fáil.
Much of the microanalysis this week assumed this internal strife would damage Fine Gael irreparably and that a narrow victory for Kenny would be the worst outcome. That misses the big picture however. By the time the next election comes, the minutiae of this week’s heave will be forgotten, but the fact that Kenny was tough and saw off the challenge will be remembered.
There has emerged an enhanced regard for Kenny’s resolve and skill among politicos across the spectrum in the hours and days since the vote. Whether that resonates with the wider electorate remains to be seen.
Of course, reminding voters of their tendency to be a family at war does not help Fine Gael. However, by getting the matter over within one week, avoiding rancour in media exchanges, deflecting attention from the precise margin of victory and talking up the prospect of reconciliation, Fine Gael may have contained the damage.
How the fallout is managed will matter. In reforming his front bench, Kenny will have to embrace enough of the rebels to give the impression of reconciliation but gut enough of them to show he is in charge and will not truck further rebellion. The leadership question emerged even quicker than was suggested here last week, but the question has been asked and answered.
After these events, Fine Gael is still left with one substantial difficulty – the credibility issue that some sectors of the media and the electorate have with Kenny on economic issues.
Before this heave, the party’s unstated strategy to manage that issue was to portray Kenny as a chairman rather than chief or as the captain of a team of talents with Richard Bruton as a striker. After this heave, some of these star players will be sidelined.
More worryingly for the party is the fact that several prominent Fine Gael politicians have gone on the record saying that Enda Kenny as taoiseach would be weak on the economy.