Hi °C | Lo °C One of the critical things we, and far more importantly still Enda, should learn from our Age of Tribunals is that when sleaze arrives with a smiling face, whether it be Frank Dunlop in a council chamber, or an entirely legitimate meeting in a ministerial office, it is almost plausible.
Mr Kenny certainly has, since taking office, become so lax about tackling the issue of sleaze in politics, his response to the Phil Hogan debacle was redolent of Bertie Ahern in his pomp.
Unlike so many others in modern journalism, RTE's political correspondent David Davin Power tends to fish with a long line.
This innate subtlety means some will have missed the implications of his revelation that Mr Kenny had rung Phil Hogan over the Lowry affair and essentially wished it to be known in private (and, critically, in public) that he didn't know what all of the fuss was about.
The response was as elaborately casual as Bertie Ahern's famous query in 1997 to his morally rotten front-bencher Ray Burke if, when it came to his colourful past anything "might be troubling you Ray".
Of course, Mr Burke, and presumably Mr Ahern too, knew there was plenty of trouble hanging around Rambo, but the inquiry and its denial gave that duo a temporary alibi.
It would be deeply unfair to compare the current Taoiseach or Mr Hogan to that pair of political rogues. However, a subtle operator like Mr Kenny knows that as a critical referendum on the fiscal compact comes ever closer, the tangled relationship between Kenny, Lowry, not so Cute Oul' Phil and Denis O'Brien poses this Government with a great deal of trouble it doesn't want.
Sadly, like the dying days of Bertie 'I won the money on the horses' Ahern, so far the response to this trouble has been risible.
The claims that ministers and the Taoiseach are powerless to decide whom they will meet are not credible, while it is also difficult to respect the argument by ministers that they are obliged to meet Mr Lowry because he has a democratic mandate.
Outside of noting this was not a consideration when Sinn Fein was in its SF/IRA phase, are we to presume that if the Irish electorate in its wisdom elected a racist, they would be welcomed into the office of James Reilly and Michael Noonan with open arms?
It is, to put it mildly, disappointing that after little more than a year in government Fine Gael is already being caught with their ethical trousers down so regularly.
The good news for Enda, and nobody else, is that the dysfunctional state of the opposition and the prospect of four more years in government mean the belief of the public that this Government has already evolved into a latter-day version of the conclusion of Animal Farm does not pose the Taoiseach with any immediate problems.
However, far bigger questions are gathering around the perfect world of the Taoiseach.
Those who are not Enda's friends are asking why it is that the ghostly presence of his former boon companion Lowry, that keeper of so many secrets from his time as a FG luminary, appears to turn Enda's ethical legs to jelly.
Within Leinster House, like the famous line about what attracted the beautiful Debbie McGee to the millionaire Paul Daniels, cynics are asking what is so attractive about the billionaire multi-media owning magnate who could yet secure Enda his 'own version of the Irish Press group'.
Ironically, the main difficulty for the Taoiseach, when it comes to the somewhat compromised version of ethics he is practising, is most likely to come from among his own.
One of the 'in' jokes in Leinster House is the belief in Fine Gael that they are the Irish equivalent of the American political drama the West Wing, where a pleasantly nice Democrat president and his even more tedious staff agonise over awful dilemmas, generally caused by their Republican Party enemies, before always doing the difficult but right thing.
This is entirely understandable, for in opposition Mr Kenny created a portrait of himself as a reforming iconoclast. The reality has been somewhat more prosaic, as this is still the Republic, where moral hazard does not apply to rogue bankers, bankrupt builders or mandarin insiders.
Significantly, it took a minister from the 'old' Labour school of politics to outline the danger that an excessively casual approach to ethics might create a state where a "Berlusconi-style media-political complex" would undermine our democracy.
Those who believed such a school of politics could never evolve in Ireland should remember there was more than a small element of the politics of Mr Berlusconi in Bertie's notorious school of government by social partnership.
In fairness, Enda is far too straitlaced and honest to become the new Berlusconi but the Taoiseach's blatantly cynical response to a problem like Lowry has left him looking terribly like a Bertie.
That would be all well and good were it not that his own party has enough true believers in the West Wing status of FG to make life very difficult should Enda engage in the tactics that Bertie employed.
The Taoiseach would be even wiser to remember that whilst a moral difference does exist between the politics of a Bertie and a Berlusconi, by the end it was a mighty slim one.
And if you start to become too casual over outwardly innocent matters such as whom ministers should meet, it is a short road from there to the return of social partnership, crony capitalism and all of the other variations of sleaze Kenny so enthusiastically promised to end.
