Kenny campaign:Watch out, Enda's about. Like a greyhound released from the traps, Fine Gael's wannabe taoiseach is careering around the country in a frenetic race for power.
He's laughing, joking, shaking hands and getting his picture taken with every punter in sight. Kenny even posed with a four-month-old infant in his arms yesterday, but he stalled at giving the child a peck on the cheek.
Enda's not kissing babies just yet - but this may change before Election Day.
Reporters and supporters puffed and panted in the wake of Hurricane Enda. "You know he climbed Kilimanjaro?" said a knowledgeable source.
"And then he cycled 300km for charity."
First stop yesterday was Drogheda, where Fine Gael is waging the mother of all campaigns to get Fergus O'Dowd and Mairéad McGuinness elected in a four-seater.
There's been talk of turf wars, but the uncertain chemistry between the two candidates was forgotten in a wave of Enda-generated bonhomie.
Every so often the Fine Gael leader stopped and punched the air before heading on to the next encounter. The party faithful who thought the show was over and that Fine Gael had gone the way of Clann na Poblachta or the Irish Parliamentary Party are visibly energised in his presence.
But don't be fooled by Kenny's air of boyish enthusiasm. Enda's a cagey old bird and he generally declines invitations from journalists to enter the latest political minefield. Repeated questions for his views on Bertie's finances, and on the abortion issue, are fudged or batted away.
He places such a relentless focus on health issues that one feels slightly queasy and ill by the end of the day. This is where Enda wants to shine the spotlight - not on the Taoiseach's dig-outs and donations or on possible differences of emphasis from Labour on abortion.
The Fine Gael leader is nosey: he wants to find out everyone's business and he has a word of advice for them all. As the party storm-troopers left the venue, a woman said in astonishment: "I thought we were being raided by the bomb squad."
Three hospitals featured on the day's itinerary, in Drogheda, Monaghan and Cavan.
Waiting-lists, trolleys and lack of hospital beds are the issues he is using to propel him to power. And then there's Dick Roche, FG's favourite whipping-boy because of the Galway water crisis. "He has traumatised an entire city," says Enda.
Fianna Fáil used to be the party of "the men in the open-neck shirts", but this was the category which turned out in force to greet Fine Gael's chief in Monaghan. They ploughed through the centre of the town calling on friends to get their picture taken with "the future taoiseach". A girl from the local convent was slightly star-struck: "Am I really going to be in the Northern Standard?"
Like John Major on his soapbox in the 1992 British election, Kenny keeps a plastic packing-crate in his SUV, and he used it in Carrickmacross and later in Cavan to deliver a rousing oration which was redolent of a more populist era in Irish politics. This was Seymour Crawford country, the party's amiable TD who once dressed up as Batman for a Fine Gael fancy-dress hooley.
Standing outside Cavan General Hospital, Mrs Nuala Timmons said that she had contacted all the main party leaders about a particular problem, but only Kenny had personally got back to her. "He wasn't running for election at the time," she said. "But he is now."
