Noonan Plays the Nice Guy but Only Tough Talk Makes Waves in the EU

Byline: the mary ellen Synon coLUmn

ENDA KENNY and Michael Noonan were in Brussels on Friday evening, not for the first time, but for the first time as the soon-tobe taoiseach and finance minister. So more European journalists than you would expect were hanging around in the lobby of the European Commission headquarters waiting to ask them some questions after their meeting with Jose Manuel Barroso.

Here were the two new boys who will most likely be in charge in desperate Ireland when the markets set off the next spasm of the eurozone crisis. The European press wanted to find out something about them.

This of course left me in an uncomfortable position. I was standing with an American reporter, a correspondent from one of the German newspapers, a Greek and a couple of British reporters. They asked what this new man Kenny was like. Half the impulse at a moment like that is to play for the home team and claim Kenny is much better than Cowen and is quiet but can deliver.

Then the other half remembers that these are the journalists on whom one may depend during the long nights in the European Council press room, desperate for some statistic from Dow Jones or a line on Merkel from Die Welt. …

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Publication information: Article title: Noonan Plays the Nice Guy but Only Tough Talk Makes Waves in the EU. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: Daily Mail (London). Publication date: January 31, 2011. Page number: 12. © 2007 Daily Mail. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale Group.

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