INSIDE POLITICS - KENNY GETS CANNY

It’s now almost five years since Enda Kenny became leader of Fine Gael. So stunning was his rise without trace that most people outside the tight-knit world of politics were moved to ask: Enda who?

Kenny became Fine Gael leader at the lowest moment in (almost) the longest losing
streak in modern political history. The backroom people in Fine Gael surveying the train wreck of 2002 knew that, if the party lost again in 2007, the record would read: five successive leaders failed in five successive elections over 20 years.

When Kenny became leader, one of those strategists Frank Flannery wrote a position paper setting out a recovery plan. His key message on Kenny was that they shouldn’t expect a Wedding at Cana miracle – they needed show patience and give Kenny time to develop a persona and authority as a credible leader.

I spent some of the weekend looking over Kenny’s previous Ard Fheis speeches; some more impressive than others. One of the recurring broad themes was that he was not yet the finished article; and still a work in progress. Kenny’s favourite analogy was the GAA and his riff was that the championship hadn’t started yet.

Well. Let’s start from beginning. There is no patience. There is no waiting. The time has now arrived. The moment for judging Kenny’s leadership aura is now. No more work in progress. No more unfinished article. And the championship? Well, we’re approaching the knockout stages.

And cometh the hour cometh the man. Kenny’s leadership address was the strongest, most cogent, most coherent, most mature and most powerful that has been delivered by any leader of any party since the 2002 election.

Seven days beforehand Bertie Ahern had stood on the same stage in the same hall to deliver 30 minutes of non-stop giveaway in a showbiz razzamatazz spectacular.
Kenny’s speech was an exercise of studied contrast. He was conscious of this – conscious that he was plotting a radically different course.

"Last week, another man stood in this hall and made 53 promises," he told the crowded auditorium at City West.

Kenny instead offered only one; that he would not seek re-election as Taoiseach in 2012 if he did not deliver what he promised.

Of course, that wasn’t the only promise. It was the only new promise. In a couple of weeks, the party’s will all publish their manifestos and reveal what we all already know. In Fine Gael’s case, we know just about everything about their policies on crime (as cynically ‘tough’ as all the others); on health (no private hospitals on public land, 2,300 more beds and free GP visits for under fives); and on finances (a E450m stamp duty, tax cuts and incentives for stay-home parents).

But the tenor and tone of Kenny’s address was one of two big calculated gambles the party took this weekend.

The first was its decision to make this election a referendum on health services. The Labour Party in Britain tried that when trying to take on Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and bellyflopped embarrassingly. Fianna Fail did somewhat better when it became the linchpin of their successful 1987 campaign.

It’s still a punt. And when Fianna Fail and the PDs take out the pestle and mortar with the intention of crushing the Mullingar Accord to a pulp, Kenny and Pat Rabbitte will need to convince the electorate that they can be trusted to manage the economy
The second gamble was Kenny’s approach. This was no promise-fest. This was a leader selling himself as honest, trustworthy, a man who would live up to his promises by his deeds. To do that, he made the speech more personal, more exposed, more confessional than any other. In the process, his grandfather, his father, his wife, his children all came powerfully in to the mix.

And to that end, this was the key passage in his speech. "I believe it’s about time a politician stepped up to the line and took responsibility for their actions in government. I am that politician."

I am that politician. It was Enda Kenny saying: I am the finished article. I am a work that is complete. Leave aside your doubts, your reservations, your qualifications. With me you will get honesty, integrity, no litany of broken promises. I am the man for the job.

Within minutes, Brian Lenihan of FF was on to complain about the lack of specifics, the reliance on rhetoric. But he was missing the point. Kenny wasn’t selling policies. He was selling Enda Kenny. For Fine Gael to upset what Bertie describes as the apple tart, it needs to convince them that Kenny can step up to plate. And this arguably, was the moment he did it.

The Contract for a Better Ireland will have a resonance. In a cleverly constructed passage, he set out a long list of failings and alleged failings of this coalition, described (in very simple and broad terms) his vision of what could be achieved. Leaders’ speeches are becoming more like Ernest Hemingway short stories with the repetition of key words and phrases. Last week it was ‘steps to a better Ireland’. With Kenny it was ‘The Contract for a Better Ireland’ and ‘bond’ and promise.

"If you have given me, that most precious and most powerful thing a democrat has, your vote, then I have a moral duty, a democratic duty, a patriotic duty, to live up to my end of the contract. I belive it’s vital that you know just how serious I am. Just how serious this is."

That heady stuff could have left him exposed, especially the passage about his maternal grandfather, James McGinley a Mayo lighthouse keeper.

Did he pull it off? I think so. Kenny has travelled a long road in five years. His reach will never be that of Bertie’s amazing technicolour anorak but he has scored higher on other counts. The Fianna Fail promise-fest last weekend and BertieGate may come back to haunt the party like decentralisation, electronic voting and the latent dishonesty of its ‘no-cuts’ promises in 2002.

The polls show Kenny lagging behind Ahern in terms of popularity and ability but ahead in terms of honesty and integrity. Fine Gael will hope to capitalise on those, hope that the electorate will be swayed by arguments on governance rather than on more promises.

And Kenny’s championship? Well, the way things are panning out, it could be victory by the back door. Fine Gael has clipped its wings a bit in terms of ambition. It’s target seat gain is realistically around the 20 mark – where once it was 30 – means it will rely heavily on a solid Labour performance and a surge for the Greens (with perhaps a few independents thrown in).

There was a perception that Fine Gael had flat-lined since last September. My own instinct is that they’re back in the game. The whole picture is so fragmented now that it increasingly looks that the coalition that emerges later this summer (whether led by FF or FG) will be the most complicated configuration since 1948).

This is my analysis piece from this morning's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - PROMISES, PROMISES

This árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver, Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton said on Thursday.

Where did we hear that line before?

Oh, yes, here in fact. In this column last week we quoted Seamus Brennan saying that Fianna Fáil’s árd fheis will not be about making promises that we cannot deliver.

We all know what happened after that. We found ourselves caught in a monsoon. It might have lasted only half an hour, but it left the political establishment wholly swamped.

This column, for one, was suckered last week. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to admit that it included this ultra confident prediction: “Unlike other party conferences held so far this season, I don’t anticipate any major announcement on tax cuts, on stamp duty, on tax bands, or on anything that’s going to cost a ball of cash down the line.”

How wrong can you be? Very wrong in my case, though, in fairness, I wasn’t alone in being duped.

So when Fine Gael start telling us that they’re not going to make any promises they can’t deliver, forgive us as we laugh hysterically while quickly finding a spare patch of sand to bury our heads in.

In fairness, you can be sure that Fine Gael won’t be making any major tax announcements for the simple reason that they have already made all their major tax announcements already.

The first part of it was the 2% cut in the standard rate, the Labour part of the deal. Fine Gael’s own portion is the proposed cuts in stamp duty Enda Kenny announced on a slow Thursday during a visit to Rathkeale.

That begged a number of questions. Why then? Why not wait until the árd fheis where you can get maximum impact for expensive — yet definitely populist — concessions on stamp duty?

Part of the answer to this became evident last night during Kenny’s opening speech to the conference and his key line that “the General Election this year will be a referendum on this Government’s handling of the health services”.

That is what you’d call a “raise on the blind” in poker parlance. It is by any measure a massive gamble, saying that the election will turn on health rather than on the economy without fully knowing if those cards will be revealed.

Sure, health is always a core issue. But will a party’s policies on health be more swayable for a majority of voters than its economic and financial policies? It’s a big call. But it has been made: you can see this calculation playing through in the themes that the party has chosen for this morning’s live TV coverage of debates — crime and health.

And yes, like Seamus Brennan a week earlier, Richard Bruton insisted this week that this árd fheis will not be a manifesto launch.

But given that the party will have an almost unfettered chance to push its agendas and candidates this weekend, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t a couple of major announcement.

But the difference will be that big surprises will be in the areas of health and crime rather in tax, stamp duty or other wallet-fatteners.

Seamus Brennan worried about promises the opposition made and their potential to bankrupt the country. I don’t think (here I go again; a fool never learns) anything Fine Gael will promise this weekend will bankrupt the country financially.

But there are other ways of bankrupting a country. At present, the Oireachtas is debating a draconian piece of legislation proposing tough mandatory sentences, erosions to the right of silence, seven-day detention, restrictive bail laws including electronic monitoring. In the dying days of this government, it has been rushed through quicker than a Bertie Ahern árd fheis promise.

The problem is that there’s no opposition to it from the big parties. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (and to a lesser extent Labour) do their Big Bad Wolf impressions huffing and puffing at each other to see who’s toughest. And the perverse creation and ratcheting-up of a crime crisis that simply doesn’t exist has led to the most cynical auction of all.

At last year’s árd fheis, Enda Kenny promised drunk tanks, among other hardchaw policies. That was scary. I’m worried he’ll go too far this year, establish Fine Gael’s law and order credentials by suggesting something even crazier than the Government’s crazy policies; and end up overbidding at an auction that can leave us
all bankrupt when it comes to justice, proportionality and morality.

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner.
Read Enda Kenny's opening address to the FG Ard Fheis here

INSIDE POLITICS - FIANNA FAIL ARD FHEIS

In the knowledge it’s a little vulgar for first thing Monday morning, we still couldn’t resist distorting the famous Mae West line to describe the amazing conversion that happened Fianna Fail this weekend:“Is that a gavel in your pocket and are you just happy to see me?”


For having spent many weeks slating the opposition for getting involved in irresponsible ‘auction politics’ and out-vying each other on tax cuts, Fianna Fail this week decided that the best way of beating them was to get in on the act.

Drawing to the close of a humdrum Ard Fheis in City West this weekend– with the exception of Brian Cowen’s majestic demolition of Fine Gael’s tax proposals – Bertie
Ahern stood up on the podium on Saturday night and electrified the weekend with an unusual – nay, extraordinary – leader’s speech.

It was a baffling kind of affair, going against the grain of everything we had been expecting all week. On Tuesday, Social Affairs Minister Seamus Brennan had launched the ‘clár’ for the Ard Fheis and also took the opportunity to flay the opposition with some hard ‘timber’ for their irresponsible spending policies.

“Fine Gael and Labour have been making commitments now for over two years in the Dail and in policy documents. They add up to a frightening amount of money. It’s not a competition we are interested in entering,” he proclaimed.

Well within four days the Fianna Fail star players had entered the fray. And in 30 minutes, Bertie Ahern had managed the amazing feat of making more new promises and commitment than the combined opposition had made in two years.

There were some pundits (including this one) who were made to look foolish by Ahern’s speech, having confidently predicted that there would be nothing new or substantial in his speech in terms of promises. Ministers would consistently tell you that they would continue in Government mode (ie running the country) for as long as possible and that the party’s policies and manifesto would appear only after Easter. Until yesterday morning, when ministers started dropping big hints into their own speeches, there was no general inkling that it was going to take place.

So what happened? Had we been given a bum steer? Had those clever backroom wonks in Fianna Fail managed to keep it all strictly confidential to be gloriously revealed by Ahern on Saturday night?

Erm, no. The first hint was on Saturday evening. Usually, the script of the leader’s speech is released under embargo in late afternoon to allow TV, radio and Sunday newspapers to absorb it. But for once, the script was late, not arriving until after 6pm. This suggested that late amendments had been added.

And later that night a member of the Cabinet told me that none of the proposals to cut rates of tax and PRSI were in the original speech. Yes, the Minister said, there were a couple of sweeteners in the speech. But the decision to include the kitchen sink and all was taken at a very very late stage.

And the reason for that? Nerves verging on panic. Ahern himself had always spoken about Easter as being the natural starting point for the campaign. But what he read on Saturday night was, to all intents and purposes, the party’s manifesto masquerading as a leader’s speech.

The decision to shunt everything forward, according to the senior minister, was made on the back of two opinion polls that spelt bad news for Fianna Fail this week.

The first in the Star on Thursday showed the party at 32% in Dublin, support levels that would invariably lead to the party losing seats. And then yesterday, the Sunday Business Post’s latest monthly tracking poll showed marginal slippage for FF for the second successive month. Given that the party’s support levels were consistently in the 40s in the run-up to the 2002 election, this gave Ahern some cause for concern.

Hence, the front-loading of all its best goodies and the decision to start now, not at Easter. And in his interview with RTE Radio’s ‘This Week’ yesterday Ahern gave credence to this when accepting that his party were lagging behind the others.

“When you are in government for a decade, it’s just that bit harder. The polls are very interesting if you look back over the past 15 months.

“There has been a swing of about four times of us being up five and being back down five. I accept that we are down in the opinion polls even though there are on a small basis.”

Well, there are two reactions to panic – fight or flight.

And certainly Ahern’s instincts on Saturday were all fight. His leader’s address was the best he has made in a couple of years, helped by the fact that he was talking in simple language about tangible things and not about concepts.

Promises came faster than bids at a charity auction. No sooner had Ahern hit the gavel on a new promise, than another one had materialised. The policies seemed to poach bits out of other party policies with a couple of novel ideas of FF’s own making. The elimination of the ceiling on PRSI will be popular as will the halving of rates, and the dropping of tax rates

It was getting harder to keep up with the pace of Bertie’s speech, as the promises stacked up. Increasing tax bands; rises tax credits in line with wage inflation; the State pension to be increased from E200 to E300 over five years; outflanking Fine Gael on tough cop stuff with promises of mandatory jail terms for unprovoked assaults, CCTV cameras everywhere and compulsory drugs tests in prisons. More cops. Step-down beds. More teachers. Cafes for teenagers. It went on and on.

But when you start looking at how much all this is going to cost, Fianna Fail’s earlier claims of auction politics begins to look very hollow indeed. After the speech, senior ministers argued that these promises weren’t part of the auction because they were all costed and affordable.

But then all of the other parties have done the same exercise. And I think, strategically, that Fianna Fail has realised very late in the day that it blundered by ignoring massive the E8 billion surplus warchest in the Government Exchequer.
All the other parties saw that dropping ball and caught it before it bounced. Thus, they were able to offer wallet-fattening incentives without being accused of spending beyond their means.

The upshot of it all is that the gloves are now off. Fianna Fail also unveiled its first poster yesterday, a sure sign that the bidding war is on. It might not have been called yet but the election campaign is now in full flight.

This is my analysis from today's Irish Examiner

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE: ALL SCHLOCK, NO HORROR

THE way Fianna Fáil plays it is always pure Hollywood.


The body count is always high. Our heroes will have survived more scrapes than Indiana Jones and 007 combined. But somehow — despite all the odds — they emerge triumphant at the end.

It’s not that Fianna Fáil hasn’t shipped damage as the plot of this election has thickened. It has. Where do you begin? Decentralisation; electronic voting; BertieGate and debts of honour; nursing home charges; the sly cuts after the 2002 election; the CC case and statutory rape controversy; Eddie Hobbs and ‘Rip-Off Republic’; the Ivor Callely and Seán Haughey mess; the shifting mists that were Bertie Ahern’s views on Charlie Haughey; and, come to think of it, on everything else! And then there were the minor sub-plots: the exiling of Beverly Flynn and the utterly anonymous Michael Collins.

But the party clearly calculates that none of these — individually or collectively — will be enough to swerve it off course. The party felt emboldened enough earlier this week that the election will be fought on just one issue. And what is that? The Big E. No, not the environment, sadly. It’s the economy stupid.

Séamus Brennan set the tone when he began Fianna Fáil’s first bit of ‘pre-taliation’ by accusing the opposition of spendthrift flagrancy in their policies so far. These would end up costing billions and could bankrupt the country, claimed Brennan in his most sincere ‘I’m not messing now’ voice.

Of course, the corollary to that is that Fianna Fáil has kept its powder dry so far and is sure to announce its own lucky bag of goodies (of course, also costing billions) closer to the election.

Of course, the 71st Ard Fheis this weekend is an election one. But what’s interesting when you flick through the clár and observe the confident body language of ministers is this: they believe that the Big E will bring them home in 2007, as it did in 2002.

There will be no death by a thousand cuts this time. Yes, all those issues will be a factor. Some will hurt electorally. And, of course, the health and crime crises are biggies and could inflict potentially massive holes below the waterline.

But the net conclusion is that none is big enough to down FF completely. The party is like an SSIA account holder who has gone down the equity route. With only one month left it is hoping that no sharp shocks or corrections happen on stock markets that could put it all in jeopardy.

In the world of politics that means an A&E disaster; a CC case or Fr Brendan Smyth-type scandal; or an announcement from one of the huge technology companies that its ditching us for Timbuktu or Bora Bora.

And having done the political calculus, the Taoiseach and his closest aides have come to the conclusion that the economy out-trumps them all. The thinking goes: ‘The only thing that has made all these things possible — from roads to health to childcare — has been a thriving economy. And the only party that can guarantee the Big E is FF.’

Look at the slogan. “Leading Ireland Forward“. It could as easily be, More of the Same, or, Five More Years.

Listen to what Brennan had to say this week about this: “The task ahead in the future is to keep that going, not to put it at risk and to protect that economic development.”

Expect Ahern to expand on that in his presidential address tonight. Unlike other party conferences held so far this season, I don’t anticipate any major announcement on tax cuts, on stamp duty, on tax bands, or on anything that’s going to cost a ball of cash down the line. Not this weekend, maybe later (though there will be a couple of news lines to feed us ever-hungry news hounds).

The purpose this weekend will, therefore, be to rally the troops, for Ministers to bask in the glory of their mini fiefdoms, and an effort to portray a Government on top of its game.

Bertie Ahern is the poorest public speaker of them all, though Trevor Sargent gave him a good run for his money at the Green Ard Fheis last month. But that doesn’t matter. Bertie is still his party’s biggest asset. His worth to the party lies beyond oratory, in that ethereal quality that can be described only as Bertiality. And its effect has not worn off enough to prevent his face from adorning a lamp-post near you.

Yep, in true Hollywood tradition, what Fianna Fáil is really planning is ‘2002: The Sequel.’

This is my column from today's Irish Examiner

Click Here!

By the way, this is Bertie Ahern's opening address to the conference last night. He majored on the environment - it's definitely get scared of the Greens time!