Advanced Statistics and Probability

Maths must have been Enda Kenny's favorite subject. He's counted up the seats in the 30th Dail, divided by 2, added one, and come up with Enda Kenny as An Taoiseach. Numbers don't lie.

For Mr. Kenny to achieve his life's ambition, he has only to form a coalition. It would be the All In Except For Fianna Fail, You Can't Play With Us umbrella organization that would take in every party save the one with the most seats. He's started up already, whispering in the school yard behind Bertie Ahern's back.

"You don't want to go into government with him," he says to his would-be friends. "He's not the sort of boy your mammy would like you to associate with. He's done some very bad things. Dishonest lad, and not coming clean at all."

While Mr. Ahern's legal team takes the Mahon Tribunal behind the shed and beats it to a pulp for 'leaking' certain documents meant to damage Mr. Ahern's reputation, Mr. Kenny is reminding all of the newly elected politicians that Mr. Ahern's finances have been called into question. Intimating that the man who figures on being An Taoiseach for a third time is a dishonest thief, Enda Kenny is going around in search of coalition partners and presenting himself as the better choice. Sure he looks like a choir boy, clean cut and earnestly intense. Play with his team, he says, or you'll be cast in the same dim light as that nasty boy who has yet to explain where the money came from and how is that the amount lodged equals exactly $45,000. You're not like him, now, are you? You don't want the neighbors to think you turn a blind eye to such goings-on, do you?

The one problem with Mr. Kenny's mathematically feasible coalition is that, like a house built on sand, it isn't stable. Fine Gael and Labour had gone into the election as a team, agreements agreed, but if Mr. Kenny is to be Taoiseach his coalition will have to include the two Progressive Democrats who retained their seats, former enemies made over into pals. He would have to make the Greens happy, throw them a sop of reduced carbon emissions by 2020 or something along those lines. Sweep up the occasional independent, offer a low level ministerial position, and then Fine Gael would have to go into government with Sinn Fein. That part of the equation just doesn't add up.