Enda Kenny Follows the Herd

So Enda Kenny says Fine Gael will be opposing NAMA. After sitting on the fence so long it almost seemed to be a religious devotion, the leader of the opposition has finally staked his claim to the moral high ground after just about everybody else in the country has had their say. If this is leadership, the guy passed out in his own urine in a pub doorway must be a serious contender for the presidency.

Say what you like about Brian Lenihan (and I have!) at least the guy came up with a plan when the markets were about to pull the plug on Ireland. He also had the humility to admit his own ignorance of economics - and the abject failures of the mandarins in Finance - by bringing Alan Ahearne on board at a crucial moment.

Fine Gael have been a busted flush for at least 20 years. So it is a sad indictment of the body politic in this republic, that the main party of opposition are still the ragtag rabble who inherited the split that took place in the IRA in 1922.

John Hume once asked, when decommissioning was a hot topic in the North, "where are Fine Gael's guns?" He might well have asked, where are their policies? This group of wannabe ministers are truly an ideology-free zone. One might almost say, an ideas-free zone, if it wasn't for honourable exceptions like Alan Shatter and David Stanton.

As someone who got closer than I liked to this party during the last Dail, when they had almost been annihilated in the polls but still managed to return 32 TDs thanks to our crazy form of PR, I can vouch for the bovine nature of the FG collective intellect. One only has to look at Paul Kehoe, the Chief Whip! or John Perry and Damian English to realise that any child from a special needs class could run rings around them. And yet these people are seriously being considered as senior ministerial material in the inevitable FG-led coalition we are soon to have.

Ask yourself why our press barons are not the slightest bit interested in asking these dunces any hard questions, or testing their fitness for office in any way at all. If you think Brian Clowen and Mary 'not-a-clue' Coughlan are dire, wait til these tulips start running the country.