Enda won his own lottery when he became Taoiseach

It’s a bit rich of Mr Kenny to launch a commission on low pay when his salary is €185,000 a year, or €3,500 a week, which is more than the leaders of the much larger Britain and France earn

                                                                                 Enda Kenny

IT WAS Enda Kenny’s Marie Antoinette moment. Reality and regality diverged as the Taoiseach showed how out of touch he is with the people he aspires to lead.

Launching a low-pay commission, Mr Kenny was asked by the Irish Examiner if there was scope to further cut the salary of the Taoiseach, or if he was worth the €3,500 a week we pay him. He replied: “Very much so.”

So, there you have it, our very own L’Oreal Taoiseach, paid more than the leaders of Britain or France — because he’s worth it.

Mr Kenny’s handlers knew he had dropped a howler, but it was too late. The comment’s arrogance will resonate to polling day.

The Taoiseach then sensed things slipping away from him, but his efforts to regain the initiative made matters worse. “Salaries are down 40% in the case of the Taoisigh — we’ve cut everything to the bone. And your question is typical,” he said.

I suspect that the people who really are on the bones of their arse think that ‘struggling by’ on just €3,500 a week is still a bit of a juicy one.

And as for the comment “your question is typical”, which he sneered at this column? ‘Typical of a free press holding an arrogant executive to power, is that what you meant, Taoiseach’?

Erm, no, that is probably not what Mr Kenny had in mind. It was more likely along the lines of: “Typical the Irish Examiner should dare question me, rather than just accept my magnificence as read.”

If you can’t ask a Taoiseach at a low-pay event about his vast salary, when he is trying to convince us he has finally woken up, after four years in power, to the reality of people scrapping by on a pittance, where can you?

The CSO has just revealed that 144,000 children are living in consistent poverty. This means their families cannot afford the basic levels of heating and clothing they need. So, is it acceptable for a Taoiseach to blithely insist that he is worth three-and-a-half grand a week?

Mr Kenny is also always banging on about wanting to make this the best ‘small country’ in which to do business.

So, should the business of our leaders not be to cut their own financial cloth in accordance with the needs of a small country?

Though well down on the obscene €310,000 that — surprise, surprise — former taoiseach Bertie Ahern paid himself, at €185,000 Mr Kenny gets a very good deal compared with other Western leaders.

Before the Greek crisis sent the euro into a temporary plunge, Mr Kenny was earning more than Britain’s PM, David Cameron, who gets €170,000 a year, as does the President of France.

Britain and France are the fifth- and sixth-largest economies in the world, are nuclear powers and wield a veto at the UN security council. Yet, the Taoiseach of Ireland — a country that has a population smaller than the 5.3million boasted by Yorkshire — gets paid more than their leaders.

Does that make sense to anyone other than Mr Kenny and his bank manager?

It is just one week since Mr Kenny, at the Fine Gael national conference, aped the British prime minister’s slogan “We are all in this together”.

And his wage comments prove that the words are just as empty in his mouth as they are in that of his fellow Tory across the Irish Sea.

It is the same with thrusting Thatcherite Leo Varadkar, who, at the height of the anti-water-charge anger, expressed bemusement that people were getting so excited at having to pay €3 a week. But then when you earn almost as much as Cameron does — €157,000 — for being an Irish Cabinet minister, then, really, what is €3 out of €3,000 a week?

One of the achievements of this Government was to restore the shameful Fianna Fáil-Green Party cut in the minimum wage, and the establishment of the low-pay commission is a belated, but very welcome step in the right direction on wage equality.

But when you have the Cabinet spouting crap about all being in this together, while they pocket three grand a week, at the same time as cutting child benefit and snatching €80 a week from lone parents as a way of forcing them to take jobs (what jobs?), the political spectacle just becomes nauseating.

Mr Kenny was also playing fast and loose with the facts with his sloppy remarks about the Taoiseach’s salary being down 40%, as some of these cuts were made in the previous Government.

When Mr Kenny assumed the top office, he was entitled to €214,000, after cuts by the collapsing Fianna Fáil administration.

Mr Kenny decided to draw €200,000, and then this was further reduced to €185,000, under the Haddington road deal, meaning it fell by 15% from what he could have had under his watch — though the ‘lower’ level is still far above what he was receiving as opposition leader.

Mr Kenny has suddenly popped-up on a few soft-question interviews in recent weeks, because his minders have seen the polling data, which shows the public regards him as aloof. They think he does not feel their pain.

The new charm offensive was supposed to restore in the public mind the image of the old, easy-going Enda.

Well, his L’Oreal comment has certainly been offensive to people getting by on a meagre €8.65 an hour, but where is the charm?

Of course, Marie Antoinette never actually said: “Let them eat cake”.

But Mr Kenny did say he is “very much” worth three and a half grand a week.

And the end result is the same — an angry, abandoned public demanding their leaders’ heads.

Shaun Connolly