Declan Lynch: The deadliest foe is the attack of eejitry from within
Enda's performance in Davos, not the fake horseplay in Brussels, was the real problem, writes Declan Lynch
When the mainstream fails us, it gives an opening to darker forces. And last week Gerry Adams took advantage when he accused Enda Kenny in the Dail of acting "like an eejit" in his encounter with Nicolas Sarkozy in Brussels.
Now, as it happened, the incident with Sarkozy, in which the Frenchman could be seen ruffling the Irishman's hair as both men laughed heartily, was actually not a case of Kenny acting "like an eejit" in the true sense.
It may have had shades of Father Ted and Dougal, with Kenny, of course, as Dougal. But there are subtleties in this thing we call eejitry which are entirely beyond the comprehension of a man such as Gerry Adams -- for a start, he seems unaware that his own business of Irish nationalism and its allied trades have been and continue to be the single richest source of eejits and eejitry across the whole spectrum of the Irish experience.
So in his condemnation of the Sarkozy incident, Adams had the right string, but the wrong yo-yo, as it were.
Kenny may not have been acting like a true eejit in Brussels -- it was no more than a routine case of fake horseplay, a basic skill for any professional politician -- but in his "mad borrowing" performance in Davos, most certainly he was displaying pure eejitry, at the highest level.
And the mainstream media, the regular political class, failed to call it. Indeed they called it almost everything apart from what it was, an outbreak of eejitry in the classical sense. And now that Adams has barged in with his offering, it is too late for them to call it, or to re-call it.
But for the record, Davos was a clear case of Enda letting loose this thing we call the Inner Eejit.
We do not condemn him for this, because the Inner Eejit lives in so many of the Irish, forever threatening to break out and to put on a little show, unless we keep it on a very tight rein.
Freud felt that the Irish were the only people who were not amenable to psychoanalysis. He might have made more progress with Paddy if he had identified this Inner Eejit, an elusive concept to be sure, but one which is perhaps best illustrated by an individual case study such as the following. Around the time of the Queen's visit to Ireland, an intelligent and sophisticated Irishman living in London was walking down the street in the fashionable Notting Hill area when he saw the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman walking towards him. Normally this would mean very little to such an urbane fellow -- he had actually seen Paxman on this very street on a few other occasions, without feeling any great excitement.
Ah, but with the Queen's visit in his thoughts, suddenly, horribly, the old Inner Eejit rose up inside of him, and he found himself feeling an almost irresistible urge to shake hands with Jeremy Paxman, to make some remark about the significance of the events back home, and how this was an extraordinarily happy period in Anglo-Irish relations in general.
How he restrained himself, he still does not know. He only knows that the struggle with his Inner Eejit at that moment left him drained for days afterwards, as if he had wrestled with a mad dog.
Even now, when he remembers that terrifying moment, he shakes his head in bewilderment and whispers to himself: "Ah, Paddy ... Paddy ... Paddy ..."
Yet he is grateful too, for that awareness of his Inner Eejit which he had cultivated over many years, for all the work he did on himself to somehow stop it coming out -- at least in public.
Enda Kenny has not done that work. And therefore, he is always vulnerable to that deadliest of foes, the attack from within.
He fancies himself a bit, you see, which is perhaps understandable in a person of above average intelligence who has spent most of his life in and around the Dail Bar. It is as understandable as Father Ted fancying himself a bit, when he looked around him and saw the other denizens of the parochial house.
Tragically, the Inner Eejit is especially merciless towards any man with a touch of vanity. So it keeps coming out in Kenny.
When he made that speech last year which, shall we say, echoed a speech of Obama's, it was wrongly described by many in the Irish media as plagiarism.
In fact, it was just our old friend, eejitry.
When he said that he cried when he saw Riverdance -- pure eejitry there.
And then you remember that a couple of years ago, this man, at some law society gathering, was seen playfully kissing the hand of a woman -- for any Irishman, the ultimate eejitry.
Enda Kenny is not a bad man. But he needs help.
Originally published in
