Kenny’s State of the Nation allows him seven minutes of airtime without being interrupted

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

A quiz to be held in about a month’s time.

Question One: Where were you when 9/11 happened?

Question Two: Where were you when you heard Nelson Mandela had passed away?

Question Three: Where were you when Galway won that fateful All-Ireland in 1980?

Question Four: Where were you when Enda Kenny made his State of the Nation speech marking the moment when Ireland exited the bailout?

The chances are, when asked those posers sometime in early 2014, you will be able to make a fair attempt at the first three. But mark my words, if you are not stumped by the fourth one, they are going to need crowbars to lever and prise that political anorak off you.

Yep, Enda’s seven minutes of intonement to the nation isn’t going to live long in the memory banks – the best that can be said about it is that it wasn’t as awful as the last ‘State of the Nation’ speech he made in 2011.

That one was made before the Budget and was a naked party political broadcast for Fine Gael and the Government, letting rip at the Fianna Fáil led Government and telling everybody how brilliant the Coalition was.

Even back then he admitted it wasn’t going to be easy. But unforgivably he used the opportunity to float for the millionth time that cringe-inducing cliché of his that he wanted Ireland to become the best small country in the world to do business in by 2016.

The message last Sunday night was that he wanted to become the best little government in the world to vote for in 2016.

Usually, ‘State of the Nation’ addresses are reserved for times of national emergency. In fact, the Broadcasting Act gives the Taoiseach of the day an automatic right to make a ‘State of the Nation’ address to the Irish people on national television, but only in the case of a national emergency.

The two most memorable examples are Jack Lynch’s address in 1969 when it looked like there was going to be a pogrom of entire Catholic communities in the North. With a huge upsurge in violence directed at Catholic communities seemingly imminent, he told the Irish people that the Government would not stand by.

Eleven years later, Charles Haughey had just succeeded Lynch as taoiseach and it became quickly clear to him that the economic policies set out in Fianna Fáil’s expansionist 1977 manifesto were not working and the economy was heading for a shock.

He took to the airwaves in early 1980 to inform the nation with a funereal voice that “we as a people are living way beyond our means”.

The address was dramatic and would have been remembered in any instance. What made it doubly memorable were the revelations that followed 15 years later about the massively extravagant lifestyle Haughey himself was living at the time. The phrase ‘living way beyond our means’ might have been invented for him.

In fact, there were two other such ‘State of the Nation’ broadcasts. Both of them were made by Garrett FitzGerald during the 1980s but were very political in tone and focused on economic issues. Both have fallen into obscurity since, as Kenny’s two less than memorable efforts have.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.