Enda Kenny
Enda Kenny was Taoiseach of Ireland from 2011 to 2017, the first from Fine Gael to serve two terms, the schoolteacher from Mayo who had been in the Dáil since 1975, when he took his father's seat at twenty-four, and led the party from 2002, when it had thirty-one seats, to the election of February 2011, when it had seventy-six and Fianna Fáil, which had governed for sixty-one of the previous seventy-nine years, had twenty. He took over a country under the troika's programme, with the banks nationalised, the deficit at thirty-two per cent of output the year before because of them, unemployment at fifteen per cent and a hundred thousand emigrating a year. He left it in 2017 with the programme exited in December 2013, the fastest growth in Europe, the promissory notes for the Anglo Irish Bank restructured, unemployment at six per cent and the emigrants coming back. The government also held the referendum of May 2015 that made Ireland the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, by sixty-two per cent, which he had campaigned for in a party that had not. There was the Dáil speech of July 2011 in which he told the Vatican that the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism of the Holy See had been exposed by the Cloyne report on the abuse of children, after which the nuncio was recalled. There were the water charges, which brought a hundred thousand people into the streets in 2014 and were suspended, and the Garda whistleblower affair, which cost him a justice minister and a police commissioner. He was born in Castlebar in 1951, trained at St Patrick's in Drumcondra, taught primary school for four years. He was minister for tourism and trade in the rainbow coalition of 1994-97. His party nearly removed him in 2010, when his front bench revolted, and he beat them. The election of February 2016 cut Fine Gael to fifty seats and it took seventy days to form a minority government supported by Fianna Fáil from the opposition benches, which was new. He announced his retirement in May 2017, after the whistleblower affair, and Varadkar succeeded him in June. He left the Dáil in 2020 after forty-five years, the longest-serving member, and has made television programmes about Ireland's railways since.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
