by John Waters
The Irish wept and gnashed their teeth, but it was the French who were going to South Africa. And as they wept and wailed, the Irish people began to enter into a sense of themselves and their historical condition that many of them had imagined had been left behind forever. Something about the experience of this unfairness was familiar. It was as if there were songs about it already, but we had forgotten the words.
50 Enda Kenny
The problem with Enda Kenny was that he came to the leadership of Fine Gael because nobody else really wanted it as much as he did. There had been a desultory contest with four candidates, but Kenny had emerged victorious from the secret ballot on account of being the most affable and best organized of the contenders. As a former chief whip, he was well known to all members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party and was more popular than the others. He had been an unsuccessful candidate just eighteen months before, when Michael Noonan defeated him.
The party had ‘lost’ three leaders in the previous decade or so – first Alan Dukes, then John Bruton and finally Noonan, a cartoonish figure from Limerick who had been made famous in Dermot Morgan’s depiction in the weekly radio satirical show, Scrap Saturday. In the case of each of the three previous leaders, there had been a clear sense of entitlement. From the late 1970s, it had been clear that either Dukes or Bruton was destined to become the successor to Garret FitzGerald, so each took his turn and was dispatched following poor election results. Dukes and Bruton were both removed by internal coups, while Noonan stepped down before the same fate could befall him.
Kenny was to become a kind of default leader, having been elected after the party had lost the will to live. He had been a moderately impressive trade and tourism minister in John Bruton’s Rainbow cabinet. Everyone liked him. He was good fun, smart and idealistic in a commonsense kind of way. But nobody thought of him as leadership material until he suddenly got the idea into his head. There were suggestions that his wife, Fionnuala O’Kelly, who had been a Fianna Fáil press officer under Charles Haughey, and had crossed the tribal line to marry the young former teacher from Mayo, had implanted the notion.
From the party’s perspective, the choice of Kenny as leader was motivated by a desire, at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity, to clone the ‘Bertie factor’ by choosing someone with a high affability quotient to compete with Bertie Ahern for the feel-good sentiment that, as the third millennium stretched its feet under the table, seemed destined to last forever.
For years, Enda Kenny had been a boon companion to political cronies and journalists in the network of pubs in the vicinity of Leinster House. As a party piece, he would deliver from the political of speeches by John F. Kennedy, in a convincing imitation of the original. He was funny, decent, likeable and thoughtful.
As a political organizer and backslapper, he had few equals. In the early years of his leadership, he did amazing work, scraping Fine Gael off the floor and putting it back into contention. At a grassroots level he was liked and respected, mainly because he had no airs or graces about him. But as the potential next Chieftain of the Irish People, Kenny was beset by a problem: he did not seem to believe it either plausible or conceivable that he had stepped into the shoes of the Cosgraves and Garret FitzGerald. He seemed to want the job more than anyone had ever wanted it, and yet to have this almost childlike air of hesitancy that grew as the prospect of his elevation drew closer.
A ‘difficulty communicating’ was the favoured euphemism to describe this condition. In a sense it was accurate. Enda’s key communication weakness was something like the response of the dyslexic who, terrified of a big word, glimpses further up the line, panics and gets stuck on the simple word in front of him. Awareness of this deficiency had caused him to fall back on rehearsed scripting and studied mannerisms. Seeming to lack the confidence to claim the authority of leadership, he had been acting out the role.
Early on in his leadership of Fine Gael, some newspapers tried to label him a racist on account of a joke he had told at a party gathering. There was much huffing and puffing about whether, ‘in a multicultural society’, Kenny could be a suitable Taoiseach. In fact, all that had happened was that the old Enda had briefly resurfaced in what he imagined might be a safe environment. He had used the word ‘nigger’ in a story about being on a junket to some African country some years before, when a black barman had used the word. It was not a good joke, but only an idiot would have adduced it as evidence that Enda was a racist.
It was after this that the iron seemed to enter his soul. He would not tell any more stories or make any more jokes. He would not be himself, because that was too dangerous. As party leader, he became ponderous and heavy-handed. He acquired from someplace a deep, mellifluous voice, full of sound and fury. He began to use his hands in a statesmanlike way and generally tried to project himself as a serious phenomenon. He seemed to reach deep into himself to find unplumbed depths of pomposity before delivering himself of an opinion, a witticism or a condemnation. Nobody could take it seriously. He became the butt of routines by every two-bit comedian in the land. They called him ‘Inda’, ‘the ginger whinger’ or ‘the stiff with the quiff’.
Mostly, it was unfair. In person, Kenny is different from his media persona: the hammyness evaporates and he becomes measured and almost understated. Anyone who has encountered him at any length knows him to be an immensely thoughtful man with a host of good ideas about how Irish society should function. That this has long failed to come across is due in part to his personality, which has an element of shyness, and in part to the way he has been persuaded to present himself by those advising him about ‘media skills’. Under the influence of makeover artists and spin-merchants, he had been turned into a sub-Bertie affable acrobat, throwing shapes and mimes. It was as if someone had impressed upon him the necessity to look statesmanlike at all times, persuading him to utter, in a low, slow manner, clunking observations that might otherwise have reduced someone of his intelligence to paroxysms of laughter.
The result was this odd self-caricature, who made exaggerated rhetorical interjections in the style of the múinteoir scoile playing a parish priest in an amateur dramatics production of a play written by the local garda sergeant.
Had Enda come announced as a Fianna Fáiler, he would probably have got away with it. He had that added quality of gregariousness you associated with Soldiers of Destiny and did the backslapping thing at least as well as the best among the old enemy. During an attempted coup within Fine Gael in the summer of 2010, Kenny’s stalwart band of loyalists successfully put about the suggestion that the rebels were a bunch of prissy cappuccino drinkers, whereas Kenny’s people were racy of the soil and ate their dinners in the middle of the day. Kenny survived, going on to become Taoiseach within the year.
He was elected on what might have been taken for a wave of popular acclamation but was really the exhausted spirit of a defeated people recognizing that Enda possessed, at least, a passion that nobody else seemed capable of summoning. For so long it had seemed implausible that Enda might be turned to in this way, and yet, when it happened, it was accompanied by an electoral embrace that had about it more than a little affection. Finally, Enda was delivered to the Taoiseach’s office with a tenderness and goodwill that seemed to reflect his own vulnerability. He was our last option and we wished him well, but deep down we all knew that he could only surprise us.
Kenny’s primary problem remains that the qualities that enabled him to survive as leader of his own party are precisely those that militate against him on the broader stage. He is outside mainstream Irish society, looking in rather than comfortably sitting within the changed and still changing Ireland and speaking on its behalf. He is the product of smoke-filled party backrooms rather than the street sensibility of a country in which everything clicks a hundred times snappier than when he entered politics on his father’s death in 1975.
It would be remiss not to note that the outcome of the election indicated a tentativeness also on the part of
the voters – to be interpreted, perhaps, as a withholding of total confidence in Enda. An obvious interpretation of the ebb and flow of the election campaign was that, having briefly contemplated giving Enda an unequivocal nod, the people pulled back at the last to ensure Labour would ride shotgun. Another reading is that we never had any real choice anyway: Enda’s destiny and his people’s seemed to have been intertwined from way back. We were down to our last option, the one we might have given least consideration to had there been any realistic alternatives.
On the face of things, Enda was too much like the rest of his countrymen not to render it inevitable that he would feck things up. But you never knew. Since, for a long time, we have sought to place our faith in people we thought of as slightly better than ourselves, perhaps we have nothing to lose by trying out a man who is no better or worse than most of us.
Ten Per Cent Extra Recession Buster
St Patrick
It is said that Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, went to his grave at the age of 120 regretting some unspecified act or offence he had carried out in the course of his life – something he felt had offended the Christian education he had received as a child.
Nobody is certain what he had in mind, but there is increasing circumstantial evidence that the source of his anxiety was the series of events that led him to save Ireland from pagan perdition and the awful consequences that have since ensued.
The story goes that Patrick, born on either the north coast of France or the west coast of Scotland, was carried off by Irish pirates as a young boy and sold to be the slave of a pagan Irish chieftain called Milcho. For six gruelling years Patrick minded Milcho’s sheep on the bleak hills, until a voice from heaven told him it was time to go home. He ran away and made his way to the coast, where he found a ship and embarked on his journey back to France or Scotland.
Some years later, he experienced a vision in which the Irish people beseeched him to return and teach them the true faith. He studied for the priesthood and afterwards spent another thirty-eight years preparing for his mission. On returning to Ireland, nearly fifty years after his departure, Patrick was set upon by a band of fierce men. History does not recall that they were dressed in leprechaun hats and singing ‘Ole, ole, ole’, although nor is there any evidence to reassure us otherwise. Dichu, the leader of this band of savages, raised his axe to kill Patrick, but his arm became stiff so he could not complete the manoeuvre. He fell upon his knees and was converted. After that, Patrick went all over the place, converting all and sundry from the evils of drunkenness and debauchery, encountering many trials and adventures along the way.
For centuries, Irish people appear to have remained oblivious to the reality that, in praying to God, they have been pretty much wasting their time. It is neither widely known nor comprehended, in Ireland or elsewhere, that, in a deal with God, Patrick managed to negotiate the right to be the judge of the entire Irish race on Judgement Day. This agreement followed after Patrick’s legendary Lenten penance atop the Mayo mountain nowadays known as Croagh Patrick, where he prayed for what seemed the impossible objective of saving Ireland’s incorrigible population from eternal damnation. As Easter dawned, God sent an angel to tell Patrick that his prayer had been answered: that he had, in accordance with his request, been deputed to dispense judgement to all Irish citizens on the Last Day.
It seems a strange thing to ask for. The implication, clearly, was that Patrick believed that he could successfully convert and reform the savage race whose spiritual condition had become his sole responsibility. There is no recorded evidence that Patrick regretted his decision to ask God to charge him with this onerous role and invest him with all the attendant powers. But one obvious way of interpreting his reported anxiety concerning the unspecified act of folly or error that he felt had somehow blighted his life is that he had another vision in which he foresaw how his own feast day would pan out and came to realize the enormity of the horror he had spawned and brought upon himself.
Perhaps, in that vision, he had an opportunity to see the downstream confluence of consequences arising from him becoming the Patron Saint of Ireland and acquiring the responsibility for the ultimate destiny of every Irish man and woman who ever lived. Since we have no reason to believe that Patrick was other than a sensitive and gentle soul, that possibility should seem neither remote nor surprising.
St Patrick’s Day is now the greatest horror Ireland has ever inflicted on itself and the world, a cultural atrocity with no equivalents in even the most grotesque excesses of other nations and peoples, large or small. St Patrick’s Day is the day when an uncontrolled explosion of national imbecility is set off in the middle of every main street and town square, and an unspeakable parody of Irish national identity is played out in a haze of alcohol. Nowadays popularly referred to as Paddy’s Day, 17 March is when we Irish get in touch with our inner leprechauns and pretend that, in portraying ourselves as lump eejits, we are being ironic. Drinking twenty pints of Guinness and vomiting in the Liffey may not be most people’s idea of a good time, but on St Patrick’s Day these become the quintessential rituals of the celebration of Irish national identity. On the day we mark in honour of the man who saved us from pagan debauchery, it is impossible to go about in public and not be accosted by men wearing ridiculous green hats, while being aurally assaulted by public address systems playing skondonktious ballads performed by be-geansied caricatures with wet brains and facial twitches.
By dint of some sick hallucination having imposed itself on our cultural understanding, these events are deemed to denote something called ‘Irishness’, though of course this miasma of Paddywhackery derives not from anything even vaguely related the reality of the Irish personality, but from a national imagination seriously compromised by the effects of ethyl alcohol. Above all, of course, ‘Paddy’s Day’ is National Batter Day, the day it is considered an act of patriotism to get hammered. Asked while on a visit to the United States for St Patrick’s Day 2010 what advice he would give to Irish-Americans on their national feast day, the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen replied: ‘As I always say, take it easy early in the day. It’s a long day.’
It is assumed that this now worldwide manifestation of buckleppery has its origins in Ireland, but in fact it began in the contorted imaginations of the exiled Irish in America and spread outwards from there. Although outsiders who take their understanding of Ireland from the global celebrations of our national feast day seem to imagine that Irish citizens go about every day, sporting green pantaloons and emitting ejaculations like ‘Top o’ the morning to ye all begorrah and but faith it’s a fine day we do be having I do declare to me God’, the truth is that this version of the Irish personality is a very recent import into the home country and is primarily the fault of St Patrick.
Everything about it is fake. ‘Paddy’s Day’ is a day when there is no escape from the grotesque and monstrous abomination called ‘The Craic’, which, like almost everything else about our ‘authentic’ Irish identity, has been recovered from the cultural skip of our next-door neighbours. There is no Irish word ‘craic’ – the word is ‘crack’ and it is pure Anglo-Saxon. And this hints at what each one of us knows already at heart – that all of the things we parade on St Patrick’s Day are grossly distorted versions of imported notions of who and what we are supposed to be like. The shamroguery and the buckleppery derive not from anything in Irish tradition or the national character, but from the grief-distorted sentimentalism of the Irish-American diaspora. But the native Paddy, with his finely tuned sense of how to relieve foreigners of their hard currency, has thrown himself into the exercise of self-caricature with relish and abandon.
Until a few years ago, certainly until the commencement of the increasingly unspeakable period formerly known as the Celtic Tiger, the native Irish on St Patrick’s Day sported a discreet sprig of shamrock, and otherwise displayed no outward signs of what is nowadays called ‘Irishness’. For those Irish who remained in their home country, St Patrick’s
Day was among the most dismal days in the Irish calendar, a day to endure before the onset of spring, a final penitential rite before shaking off the gloom of winter and embracing the hope of Easter.
But, feeling somewhat abashed as a result of watching televised reports of the parades in New York and Philadelphia, we decided, around the turn of the millennium, to get in on the act. Now we go about the place on our national feast day acting as if we ourselves have swallowed the most gruesome version of ourselves and turned a sickly green. The rest of the year we feel free to be outraged if some foreigner calls us Paddies, but on St Patrick’s Day we are determined to indulge in a self-mockery that, were it inflicted on us by others, would result in a class action for mass ridicule and racist provocation, and to disport ourselves in public as the People that Taste Forgot.
On reflection, it seems obvious why Saint Patrick went to his grave a worried man. Perhaps he had come to realize the impossibility of the task he had set himself and had caught a glimpse, in some distracted vision, of what his well-intentioned endeavours had inflicted on the world to the end of time. Even worse is the prospect that, when he finally gets to challenge Paddy with the sins committed in the name of national celebration, he will be told that the whole thing was done in his own honour. Paddy, as usual, will hope for a fool’s pardon and that will enable him to stagger through the pearly gates wearing a green hat and an orange beard, shouting ‘Top o’ the mornin’’ to the Almighty.
HM Queen Elizabeth II
In May 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England came to Ireland on a four-day visit. It had promised to be the most toe-curling event in Irish history, and so it proved. It was worse than the time back in 1995 when Prince Charles came and the sitting Taoiseach had declared the occasion ‘the happiest day of my life’. For this time, it was the happiest day of everyone’s life.