If only Enda Kenny was having a lend

IS there anything more terrible than an Irishman who has had his sense of humour surgically removed­?

It is surely a new and mutant species: the humourless Irishman.

It seems that long membership of the EU has done to the Irish governing class what 800 years of British persecution could not: removed from it all sense of humour, charm and ease.

Now the Irish government is striving to match Brussels in the dour stupidity of its political correctness.

How else to interpret the aston­ishing response of the Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, to Tony Abbott’s St Patrick’s Day message.

Abbott’s innocent, jovial, friendly remark drew a response of such stupefying, po-faced solem­nity from Kenny as to make you think someone had spiked the Irish PM’s Guinness.

Kenny accused our Prime Minister of perpetuating a “stage Irish” interpretation of the Irish.

Gimme a break.

In a nation which lost 1.5 million people in the Great Famine of the 19th century, if the worst thing that ever happens to it is that a friendly prime minister remarks, among other things, that he’d like to enjoy a Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, the correct respon­se is gratitude, not grumpiness.

Abbott also recalled the old saw that in Australia the English made the laws, the Scots made the money and the Irish made the songs. Actually, the version of that I most often hear is that the Irish made the jokes.

But to say that the Irish are responsible for the song in Australian hearts could only be construed as insulting by someone who has spent way too long in the identity politics factory of Brussels’s victim-enhancement and grievance-invention schools.

Ireland is one of the most successful countries in Europe. It paid off its debts, cut unemployment, got economic growth going again. It embraced higher taxes and lower spending on social­ services.

There is a deep toughness in the Irish character, underneath the soft charm. But the soft charm is not the enemy of the under­lying toughness.

A sour, ungenerous, schoolmistressly response to any trad­itional expression of affection for traditional Irish traits is weirdly un-Irish.

Perhaps this peculiar devotion to EU-style political correctness gone mad is just another way of being not British.

It’s an affliction only of the Irish government, not the Irish people.

If I could speak to the Irish Prime Minister directly, as one man of proud Irish extraction to another, I would say just this: “Enda Kenny, you are an eejit.’’