Enda Kenny was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, on April 24, 1951. The third child in a family of five, he was educated locally at St. Patrick’s national school in Cornanool and St. Gerald’s College (De La Salle) in Castlebar. He studied at St Patrick’s College of Education in Dublin and University College, Galway. He became a primary school teacher, as did his father and mother before him. Growing up he played Gaelic football and handball and was an active member of the Islandeady GAA Club. He also took up golf.
His father, Henry Kenny (1913 – 1975), had been TD (Dail deputy) for Mayo and he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance from 1973–1975. On his death, Enda was elected to the Dail in the by-election of 1975. Aged just 24, he became one of the youngest TDs in the Dáil. He is currently the longest-serving TD in Dáil Éireann.
He served as junior minister at the Department of Education and Labour from 1986 to 1987 and Minister for Tourism and Trade from 1994 to 1997. In the mid-1980s, he was a member of the Fine Gael delegation on the New Ireland Forum and later served on the British-Irish Parliamentary Association.
His political career almost came to a sudden halt in the 2002 general election. He was within 87 votes of losing his Dail seat to running mate Jim Higgins and was only saved by a Fianna Fail transfer on the eight count. His good fortune continued and he became Fine Gael’s tenth leader after Michael Noonan resigned following the poor performance of the party in the same election.
Under Enda Kenny’s leadership, Fine Gael gained seats in the 2004 local and European elections. But most remarkable was the party’s ability to increase its number of seats from 31 to 51 in the Dáil in the 2007 general election, even though incumbent Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was perceived by many to have comfortably beaten Kenny in the pre-election Leaders’ debate.
Enda Kenny’s leadership has attempted to define Fine Gael as a party of the progressive centre. At the Fine Gael Ardfheis in March 2007 he outlined his platform for the forthcoming general election entitled the ‘Contract for a Better Ireland.’ The main aspects of this ‘contract’ included: 2,300 more hospital beds, 2,000 more Gardaí, tougher jail sentences and tougher bail for criminals, free health insurance for all children under 16 and lower income tax.
When the votes were counted it emerged that Fine Gael had made large gains, increasing its number of seats by twenty to give a total of 51 seats in the new Dáil. But Kenny’s so-called “Alliance for Change” did not have enough seats to form a majority in the new Dáil, as neither the Labour Party nor the Greens made gains. Despite predictions to the contrary, the Fianna Fáil vote recovered sufficiently to bring it to 78 seats, and a return Bertie Ahern to power.
The economic turmoil of 2008 gave Enda Kenny and his party plenty of Government policies to criticise. The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) was one such policy, which Fine Gael refered to as “a €54 billion double-or-quits gamble by Fianna Fáil and the Greens on the property market”. The party offered its “good bank” solution as an alternative, which was influenced by the French experience in the 1990s. In response to the 2009 Budget, Fine Gael offered its alternative “jobs budget” which, Kenny claimed, would take 50,000 people off the live register.
Overall, 2009 was a good year for the party as the June local and European elections in Ireland, as well as the by-elections in Dublin Central and Dublin South, signalled a fundamental shift in Irish politics. Fine Gael became the biggest party in a national election for the first time, while Fianna Fáil obtained the lowest share of the vote in its history.
However, in 2010, after a ploor showing in the polls, his leadership was challenged by the Fine Gael Deputy leader, Richard Bruton, in June. Kenny won the subsequent confidence vote and appointed Michael Noonan as deputy leader. In the February 2011 elections he led Fine Gael to a 76 seat victory out of a total of 166 Dail seats. On March 9, with the support of Labour coalition partners, Enda Kenny was elected Taoiseach by a record 90 vote margin.
In 1992 Enda Kenny married Fionnuala O’Kelly. She was born in Clontarf in Dublin and her father, Kerry native Sean O Ceallaigh, was a former secretary general of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. They have three children, Aoibhinn, Ferdia and Naoise. The couple met in Leinster House where Fionnuala worked as a press secretary for Fianna Fáil during Charles Haughey’s reign. She later worked with RTÉ.
He plays golf and is a keen supporter of his native Mayo Gaelic football team, with which his father won an All-Ireland medal in 1936.