Updated 11.10am

THE NEW YORK Times has mistaken Ireland’s new leader for a woman, perhaps not getting that Enda can be a man or a woman’s name.

Reporting on Wednesday’s election of Enda Kenny as “The Irish Republic’s” new “Prime Minister”, the error appears in a piece bylined by Times’ reporter Sarah Lyall.

The renowned “newspaper of record” says that “Ms Kenny’s center-right Fine Gael party will now govern in a coalition with the center-left Labour Party.”

Unfortunately the error was not merely a typo with the article later referring once again to the female version of Kenny, adding: “Ms. Kenny pledged to enter into a ‘covenant with the Irish people’”

The error has now been corrected by the New York Times and the reporter who wrote the piece has been in touch with TheJournal.ie to explain that the gender error was the fault of a sub-editor:

I sent Mr. Kenny to New York as a “Mr.”; an editor there seems to have randomly and unilaterally assigned him a new gender. We’ve now fixed it. I really apologize.

Unfortunately it’s not just the New York Times that got the gender of our new Taoiseach wrong, Reuters website refers to Kenny as “Edna Kenny”: