David McWilliams - original thinker, master phrase-maker, and the nearest thing economics has to a poster boy - tells Kathy Sheridan what the 'Pope's children' and the 'Wonderbra effect' have done for Ireland.
Economists are not known as the "dismal scientists" for nothing. "There is a tyranny of economics and mathematics abroad. You see people going on TV and they articulate something that is almost tangible - and then some economist says: 'Well, I did the figures and it doesn't add up.' Economics is like the medieval Catholic Church. It is stifling debate, it's stifling people's imaginations. It's bullying people." Well, hooray for that guy, but who is he? None other than the self-described "high priest of economics" - though he's more like a cheeky altar boy - David McWilliams.
Doughty champion of individualism. Right-wing poster boy. Disser of what he calls the "Irish commentariat" (political and media pundits), while being a member of it himself. But at least he is upfront about it. "I believe totally in the individual, and I think that every culture should be judged by how they value the individual." The notion that "an idea is more important than the individual" horrifies him.
Last weekend, Sunday Business Post letterwriters accused him of being "blatantly selfish", "subtly racist" and misleading about nuclear power accidents in various columns. The day before, in this paper, Garret FitzGerald confessed to being "shocked" and "bothered" at the "exclusively power-orientated emphasis" of McWilliams's presentation to Fine Gael the previous week and, worse, accused him of drawing the wrong conclusions from census figures.
McWilliams, 39, master of the multitaskers, prince of the phrase-makers (he coined the term "Celtic Tiger"), probably rolled his eyes in his lovely, new, light-filled Killiney home and consigned them to one of his brilliant pigeon-holes You may consult your glossary now.
The first lot are probably "confused cosmopolitanists". FitzGerald (whom he hugely respects, by the way) has been consigned to a group that McWilliams calls "white-coat economists . . . who sit in lofty towers, oversubscribe to economics, and don't see the everyday reality of what's going on in society".
As his wife, Sian, serves tea and Swiss roll (from Marks & Spencer, she declares) he jokes that they should have laid out the Daily Telegraph to complete the Tory picture. Sian, however, is the one in the house with the "real job", he says. She's a lawyer with Arthur Cox. The family is completed by Cal (three) and Lucy (five), and Carolina, the Argentinian au pair-cum-IT expert.
While preparing for the return on Monday of The Big Bite, the RTÉ TV afternoon show that he presents, he's also stoking up ideas for his Sunday Business Post column, tending his online, subscription-only economics and finance newsletter (shared with an Israeli friend) and keeping an eye on the New York hedge fund he helps to run. Meanwhile, he is organising conferences, or preparing to address them. And in November, he's publishing a book, The Pope's Children, dealing with the generation born in Ireland since 1979.
From this angle, he looks like someone who leads a charmed life. McWilliams is a classic product of south Co Dublin, former boarder at Blackrock College (which he found "very open and eclectic . . . I have no idea what Bob Geldof was going on about"), alumnus of Trinity College and the University of Bruges, an energetic, humorous, articulate economist who was calling the direction of currencies for a Swiss banker in London at the age of 25.
But, he notes cheerfully, "I was always fired." That's partly because he believes that "hell is a large payroll" and partly because he is "no good at office politics" but also because he has chosen to work in the worlds of money trading and broadcasting - where jobs last about as long as a Premiership football manager's.
The jobs that came to an end most publicly were in Ireland. His tenure on NewsTalk 106's breakfast radio show ended when Eamon Dunphy arrived. The Agenda programme on TV3 was replaced by a politics show. Of the two, he says, the axing of Agenda was the bigger disappointment. "That was something I was very proud of. It was started from nothing and managed to assemble an extraordinary array of guests. But I'm not indispensable. In the end, it's just you, your family and friends, and you're not of consequence to anyone else really."
So, for two months every summer, the family decamps to Croatia, where they own a place on an island where there are no cars. "We hang out with the local priest and the local ethnic cleansers, the local lads . . . You just don't ask," he grins.
Back here, he has a lot of "old, old friends", goes to the local, plays soccer and reads "a lot". The last bit is evident. Not only has he done the reading, he also talks up a storm. His grasp of the cultural lingo is second to none. He knows the favoured tracksuit brand of the Cork "Norries" (northsiders to you), and the name of the Wonderbra model trips off his lips. To understand McWilliams's take on the economy in recent years, you need to remember that "Hello Boys" image of Eva Herzigova.
"What does a Wonderbra do? Squeezes your tits together and pushes them up. That's what has happened in Ireland. There has been the most significant social compression that any country has experienced in the developed world in the past 50 years. It's not so much that the rich got richer; everybody got richer."
By this reading, the numbers in the poorest and richest classes have fallen dramatically in four years. The middle class, however, has expanded by 25 per cent. "There are now one million in the second-richest class in Ireland. It's enormous . . . Everybody's been pushed into the middle, and that middle has been lifted up." Hello Eva.
He is bewildered that the commentariat refuses to acknowledge this. "Instead of looking at the fact that we have this massive social compression, a massive increase in wealth, a massive increase in opportunity, a huge increase in third-level education, the fact that Irish people in every survey say they're among the happiest in the world, that international surveys say it's the best place to live in the world, the Irish commentariat say: 'Hah, never! It's all drivel, couldn't be happening, this place is a hole.' So what you have is an inconsistency between the reality and the rhetoric. And this is very, very difficult for me to understand. So the Pope's generation are not understood by many who are paid to understand them, whether it's the political class or the media class."
He sees immigration as the great litmus test. Why is Ireland receiving seven times more immigrants than France - "the pinnacle of egalitarianism for many in the commentariat?" "And again, what you see - though it's not picked up - if you look at surveys, 70 per cent of immigrants in Ireland say they're happy here and much better off than they would be at home. But what do we get? We get talk about the Gama workers, which is obviously absolutely right, but it doesn't give the big picture."
At least he has earned the right to make observations. For his forthcoming book, he travelled byways usually frequented only by the more adventurous sociologists and fused those observations with his economist's take on statistics.
The book, he says, is written through a woman's sensibility. "There is a sort of inexpressive way in which discourse has been dominated here by blokes. They throw out statistics, but there's no empathy with those statistics. If we have this 25-to-35 generation who will come to dominate Irish society - in arts, media, business and politics - then they can't just be dismissed as people who live in jerry-built estates. They are the country. If we don't engage with them, we're at nothing."
"The Pope's children" - products of Ireland's great baby boom, born nine months to the weekend after the Pope's visit - are actually 25. But McWilliams packages them into the generation aged 25-35, of whom there are 650,000. "If you want to understand the future of this country, you've got to understand them. They are the people who live in Rochfortbridge, Portlaoise, Athlone, Tullamore, people who [ travel more than 20 miles to work] in this great arc that I call the Baby Belt. Did you know that 51 per cent of people in Athlone commute? Or 48 per cent of people in Tullamore?"
So he chose Kells, where "more houses have been built in the last three years than in the last three millennia". The new inhabitants "have been pushed out of Dublin, and the commentariat say it's terrible, living all the way out there in Portlaoise or wherever. So awful. But you go and talk to them and they say: 'No, it's grand.' "
He went to wedding fairs, travelled with bouncy-castle sellers, and hung around all-night service stations. He wanted to see the country when it wakes up, so he hitched a ride in the early hours with the drivers who deliver the Irish Daily Star - "the fastest-selling newspaper in the baby belt" - and wound up in Naas. "Did you know that out of 18 garages there, there's only one non-24-hour garage? This is the 24-hour society."
He went to Cork, got on a number 8 bus going to Togher- "only immigrants and old people are on buses now; you won't see Irish 30-somethings on them" - and watched "three or four fullDiadora-tracksuited lads" slug Dutch Gold and fire abuse (and, finally, a can) at half a dozen big Polish lads who had just got on. "A Polish guy looks at them and says quietly: 'I'm here to buy a flat for my wife and kid. Do you have a problem with that?' Long pause. 'C'mere,' says a Togher lad, 'how much is a flat in Cracow?' 'Fifty-eight grand,' says the Polish guy. And the tracksuits start pissing themselves laughing. 'My brother bought a flat in . . . ' says one, and suddenly it was like a chat between someone from Douglas Newman Good and a prospective buyer. And they all chatted about property for 20 minutes."
McWilliams has to be the luckiest of researchers to come upon such a scene, but it serves neatly to prove a central thesis of his. "The classes are blurring, Ireland is blurring, and property is the driving force," he says. Whatever the case, McWilliams's most interesting thesis is how this has occurred: the liberation of credit. He believes that the essential difference between the working and middle classes has been "the ability to postpone".
"The middle classes have always been able to postpone decisions, because they had access to credit. It is time horizons that dictate what class you're in. Back in the 1970s, Ireland was a 'respectocracy', not a democracy. The people with access to credit were 'respectable' people, such as bank managers, insurance people, guards, teachers. Working-class tradesmen didn't get credit, therefore their children had to go out and work. If you've no credit, you have to pay for this week's rent this week and next week's rent next week. Credit allows us to see into the future."
McWilliams calls the new upper class "hiberno cosmopolitanists", or "HiCos". The centre of their universe is Ranelagh Triangle. To distinguish themselves as posh, as against merely rich, the HiCos had to "throw up affectations and cultivations". So they became foodies, frequenting farmers' markets; delved into their Irish heritage and sent the kids to a Gaelscoil; and started going to Mass again - provided the church was "halfway up a hill or in the middle of a lake". The HiCo is as happy on Hill 16 as in the boardroom of Goldman Sachs. For the record, Michael McDowell is McWilliams's classic HiCo.
His reading of the future is optimistic. He hails the HiCos and younger and older Pope's children, those who left and came back, as "the most heroic generation of Irish people. I think they are probably the most innovative, the most tolerant, the most at ease with themselves as Irish people in the world. I wouldn't agree with those who say: 'Ah, they're just interested in SUVs and Ford Galaxies and speedboats.'
"They're part of the package, but it's not exclusive. Think of the older Pope's children; 200,000 have returned to this country and are in their 30s and 40s now. They are the most successful Irish generation yet . . . and I don't just mean materially. I mean successful at getting out of the colonial inferiority complex that we had, collectively. And they are setting the trends for the Pope's children to follow." u
The Big Bite returns to RTÉ at 2.30pm on Monday, and runs every weekday. The Pope's Children will be published by Gill & Macmillan on November 11th, €22.99