Profile/David McWilliamsDespite its incessant categorising and phrase-making, the bestselling The Pope's Children was the navel-gazing tome modern Ireland had been waiting for. But its author's new effort, with accompanying TV series, may find itself on shakier ground, writes Shane Hegarty.
Damn David McWilliams. It is almost impossible to write anything about him without drifting into clever-clever categorising. To either label him with the tags that he has attached to everyone else (with his house in Croatia and a real-estate consultancy, he is an obvious HiCo RoboPaddy), or to engage in a favourite sport among journalists: coming up with all-new stereotypes. Luas Women, say, or Audi Andrew. What do they represent? Oh, who cares. It's only a way for journalists to show how easy it is, and how they could have done what he has done. And better. If only they'd thought of it first.
But McWilliams beat them to the punch. Mind you, he was heavily influenced by Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a book by David Brooks published in 2000. McWilliams was taken by the author's use of shorthand observations, and has acknowledged his influence in adapting and applying the formula to Celtic Tiger Ireland. The result was The Pope's Children, which came out in 2005 and became a publishing phenomenon, selling around 100,000 copies and lobbing a volley of categories into the national consciousness.
Now he's back with a sequel, The Generation Game, and the formula arrives bearing a controversial thesis: that Ireland should withdraw from the eurozone, loosen its ties with the EU and rely on immigrants of Irish descent rather than on other cultures.
Those who were irritated by his incessant and convenient classifying of people and economic models will find this new work the media equivalent of having itching powder poured down their vests.
The Generation Game suffers from McWilliams's almost pathological need to coin a phrase, regardless of how much those phrases begin to pile up on the page. There is the Jack Charlton theory of economics, the French Open economic model and Wezzenomics ("the global economy works precisely the same way as a teenage disco".) We are the Botox Nation but also the Kleenex Nation. There are Jiffies and the Jagger Generation and Jugglers.
Domestic life must be a hoot for the McWilliams family. "You see," he might comment, "the economy is rather like this Baked Alaska: hot on the outside, but cold on the inside. Foreign borrowing is this gooey bit." "Oh, shut up, David, and eat your bloody dessert."
But behind the phrase-making is an economist who wishes to make a serious point, and who has a bold, visionary plan that will rescue us from the coming depression. The only way Ireland can differentiate itself from other economies, McWilliams suggests, is to use our vast diaspora as a labour resource, rather than relying on a flood of non-English speaking foreigners who'll dilute the Hibernian culture.
McWilliams is a popular man among those who have worked with him, and is described by acquaintances as affable and sharp. He is a bestselling author and a successful television personality. He is very careful throughout the book to avoid any hint of racism, and the book's introduction - signed off from his second home on an island off Croatia - reveals that he is a part-time emigrant himself. But as you read this rather wobbly thesis, it's hard not to think that McWilliams is about to get labelled in categories that won't be so good for his image.
He has hit speed bumps before. As an economist, he rose quickly: following his studies at Trinity College Dublin and the College of Europe, Bruges, he worked for the Central Bank during the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty. By the age of 27, he was a director of financial services giant UBS, before moving to Banque Nationale de Paris. He seems, though, to have consistently fallen victim to his profession's lack of sentimentality. "I was always fired," he has said. This would be, as it turned out, rather useful experience for the broadcasting career to come.
He gradually proved himself to be a smart commentator - even smarter, given that during the 1990s he wrote speeches for the then minister for finance, Bertie Ahern, while, under a pseudonym, writing articles in Business & Finance magazine that were critical of the policies.
During that decade he also wrote opinion pieces in the business section of this newspaper. As yet, there was neither a HiCo nor a Pussycat Mom in sight.
AT THIS POINT it is obligatory to point to a strange quirk of McWilliams's CV - that he did not coin the dreaded phrase "Celtic Tiger". Contrary to countless accounts in recent years, the phrase was first used by Kevin Gardiner, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, in 1994, although the biography on McWilliams's website doesn't quite put it like this: " was the first economist to predict the 1990s boom in Ireland which later became known as the 'Celtic Tiger' in a 1994 in-depth report on Ireland, its economy and its prospects."
In 2000, TV3's Agenda gave him an opportunity to interview some proper heavyweights. His website still hosts chats with Noam Chomsky, Bono and Mikhail Gorbachev, which reveal him to be a decent interviewer and an engaging TV presence. The reminder is needed, because his rather good RTÉ afternoon series, The Big Bite, was chopped last year, while two years as Newstalk's Breakfast Show host came to a public and mildly ignominious conclusion when he was replaced by Eamon Dunphy in 2004.
The following year, The Pope's Children was published. It was a top-five bestseller for every week of 2006 and turned McWilliams into a brand of sorts: clever, articulate, part economist, part witty lecturer, and likeable enough to get away with a tinge of south Dublin condescension.
Why did The Pope's Children succeed? Because in an Ireland still grappling with the rapid change and continuing fluidity of the previous decade, it offered a snapshot. A blurred and sometimes distorted snapshot perhaps, but one offering three elements that the Irish are obsessed with: money, their neighbours and themselves.
It was straight-up economics married with the "people we all know" section of a weekend magazine. It was clever and throwaway at times, but there was enough substance for people to feel that they had learned something on every page. And it let its readers indulge in an orgy of navel-gazing at a time when, for all the talk about a rapidly changing Ireland, there had been few books to have pulled things together into a neat, readable package. Meanwhile, in characters such as Breakfast Roll Man and Kells Angels, people recognised themselves and recognised others.
Some critics could see only convenient and patronising generalisations, and when the TV series followed, they could see actors playing Breakfast Roll Men and asked if it was because real-life versions didn't actually exist.
Whether the newly discovered stereotypes of The Generation Game exist either will be discussed at length over the coming weeks. As will the tone.
McWilliams has been a Henny Penny character for some time, prophesying an economic crash for a decade. The new book, which takes the slowdown as its starting point, gives him an opportunity to indulge in a post-apocalyptic scenario.
His solution is an "Irish renaissance", in which the global Irish diaspora is tapped into as both a market and a labour force, with the State funding "a Gaeltachtisation project, where the children of Irish exiles would be encouraged to come to Ireland for a few weeks in the summer. The State would set up immersion courses for our American, British, Australian, Canadian and Argentinian cousins." And we could invite them to stay.
"Many people might argue that we can't do this as we are not prepared infrastructurally for them," McWilliams writes. "Are we any more prepared for the Bulgarians, Romanians and others who can come here and settle every day without having any connection to the country?"
He argues that we should reintegrate people who have a drop of Irish blood in them and speak better English than immigrants whose "values are stronger, less cosmopolitan and more alien than ours", values which carry the seeds of the social crises of the future. It will be like Israel's Law of Return, he claims, but without the need to brutally displace another people to create a "New Hibernia". Bringing in those who are Irish, diluted or not, he writes, will make us "more Hibernian yet more cosmopolitan at the same time".
IF, BENEATH THE buzzwords and overwrought social observations, he wants to be taken seriously, he is taking a fraught route. He has, though, been a victim of journalistic jealousy for a couple of years now, and may be able to brush off the criticism as only another manifestation of that. How he will be treated by other economists will be a little more instructive.
But the big question is: will the public buy it?
The McWilliams File
Who is he?
Economist, commentator, columnist, TV presenter and author of bestselling, Celtic Tiger classic The Pope's Children.
Why is he in the news?
He has written his follow-up, The Generation Game, which will be accompanied by a TV series, Ireland's Generation Game, starting on RTÉ1 on Monday night.
Most appealing characteristic:
Colleagues says that he's an all-round nice guy.
Least appealing characteristic:
His need to categorise everyone and everything.
Most likely to say:
"The economy is like a bowl of CocoPops. And it's created a generation of CocoPop Cormacs."
Least likely to say:
"Open the borders. Let everyone in. What use is English as a spoken language anyway?"