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Enda Kenny may have kept his job but time will tell whether the crucial urban commuter belts will be impressed with this leader who doesn't connect with the people, writes Eamon Delaney.

The political scene continues to be dominated by the fall-out from the recent Fine Gael leadership contest. There were two striking features about the contest. One was the way it focussed on personalities and not ideas or policy - a continuing and frustrating characteristic of Irish politics. The other was the fact that in plumping for Enda Kenny, the party has effectively embraced an older, rural-based tribalism, as opposed to the more modern younger talents who rallied around Richard Bruton. In the long term, this does not bode well for Fine Gael gaining, or regaining, those modern, disaffected commuter-belt voters who are presently embracing Gilmore's Labour.

In general, there is no reason why a political party can't have two wings. It didn't stop the Tories or (New) Labour in Britain, or Fianna Fáil over the years, or even Fine Gael back in the 1970s, when it was split between old-style Liam Cosgrave supporters and those who rallied to the more modernist social democrat Garret FitzGerald.

But the recent battle has opened new sores and a sense of disenchantment for a party which has not been in power for a long time now. The fact also remains that with the voters, there remain serious doubts about the sellability of Enda Kenny as leader, despite the recent small rise in the party's poll ratings.

Flicking through Kevin Rafter's book Fine Gael - A Party at the Crossroads, the very points recently made by Richard Bruton supporters about Kenny's style and substance, or lack of, were being made back in 2007, and they haven't gone away.

Tactically, a Bruton-led Fine Gael would have challenged the lack of Labour policies and the free ride they've been getting with the public, and with much of the media.

For this is the big picture: Labour is the rival for Fine Gael now, not Fianna Fáil, who are on the floor. Bruton would have been the man to fight them and attack their empty policies from a economically sound viewpoint. As one Fine Gael thinker put it, "Fianna Fáil may be incompetent, but Labour are dangerous".

 This is why the prospect of a Bruton win would have scared Labour. With Kenny, they had a Fine Gael leader who was just like their own: a platitude man, high on dudgeon, low on substance. With Bruton, however, Gilmore and his Labour crew would have faced actual interrogation.

Seasoned political commentators will say, "but sure, they're going into coalition together anyway, so what does it matter?" Which may be true but it would be reassuring to see some policies offered in the meantime, and some ideas actually thrashed out. Instead, there was a serious lack of policy analysis in the recent Fine Gael contest. Those of us with differing political ideologies can only despair at this vacuum and muddle in Irish political discourse. But then as other pundits have said, this is the way of the Irish body politic - unfortunately.

Contrast this with the situation in the UK where there's an ideological divide and where politicians actually fall out over serious ideas and issues.

Instead the drama of the Fine Gael contest and the focus since then, has been all about who will support who, and who'll get the jobs. In the classic way of Irish political fixation, the story was all "process, process" separate from any real sense of policy or issues. Meanwhile, inside the Dáil, Brian Lenihan is announcing to an almost empty chamber that the controversial bank guarantee was being extended. On the day before the Fine Gael party vote, it was announced that the €22bn euro sunk into Anglo Irish bank was unlikely ever to be recovered. 

But this doesn't seem to distract from the personality contest beloved of the media outside. And any attempt to inject a bit of ideological enquiry - what exactly does Kenny stand for? Does he favour rolling back the State, or increasing it? - is met with a blank look and a comment that "sure all the parties are the same, and it's just a matter of who can play the party best and outfox the others". Enda was the master because he had worked the backbenches.

The stunning question of why we were having this contest - that Enda is simply not connecting with the wider Irish public - was conveniently ignored. 

And the plain fact is that when the party lined up behind a victorious Enda in a show of unity, all the real talent of the party was at the back, having supported Bruton. These are the young and able TDs who would understand about lost money to Anglo Irish bank and what it means to the coming generations, such as Leo Varadkar, Lucinda Creighton, Simon Coveney and Brian Hayes. They are the ones who could win the next election for Fine Gael, an election that will be decided not in rural Mayo, with all due respect, but in the dense commuter belts where people are hurting with mortgages and job losses, where voters are not interested in the old-style antics of parliamentary heaves.

However, Fine Gael have instead done an amazing thing. Out of a sense of party loyalty, they - or  just over half of them - have voted for a leader who does not connect with the Irish people. This is not in one opinion poll but a sense built up over years, a man who has failed to convince people that he is a statesman or that he knows his own mind. Or, as Leo Varadkar put it in a killer phrase, not the man you'd want to have answering the phone if the European Central Bank rang at 3am.

Whether that will continue to be the perception, only time - and a restless and demanding electorate - will tell.

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