Current Affairs:David McWilliams's analysis of the ills of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is clouded by tedious stereotyping, writes Catriona Crowe.
Early in his new book, David McWilliams introduces us to a new set of Irish stereotypes, following in the footsteps of Breakfast Roll Man, Low GI Jane, Decklanders and HiCos, all of whom he described in his previous book, The Pope's Children, published in 2005. The new ones include Pussycat Moms, Jiffys and Botox Betties, among others, many of them women, who come in for a disproportionate amount of opprobrium from the author. The broader categories include the "Jagger generation" - middle-aged people who are accidentally enriched by the property boom; "Bono Boomers" - permanent adolescents who've also done well out of property; and "Jugglers" - younger people struggling with high mortgages.
My generation, the "Jaggers", are, according to McWilliams, exercised by Rolling Stones concerts, Cream CDs, corporate boxes and Mini Coopers. We apparently bought the CD of RTÉ's excellent series Reeling in the Years. We hate nuclear power and worship France as the cradle of republicanism.
He allows that we were not a bad generation, not having genocide, ethnic cleansing or Magdalene laundries on our consciences. He gives us some credit for dragging the country into the modern age. He also tells us on page 31 that we comprise 14 per cent of the population, and on page 93 that we comprise 33 per cent. Which is it?
It is this propensity to categorise everyone, and to create connections between people just because of their age or some other irrelevant factor, that spoils the genuine insights McWilliams can have. He must know that large numbers of people of my age loathe The Rolling Stones for their fake revolutionary guff as well as their insistence on flogging a dead horse, appreciate France for other reasons than the Reign of Terror, and drive cars other than Mini Coopers - what is a Mini Cooper? - or no cars at all. And we could not have bought the CD of Reeling in the Years, because no such CD exists.
He is also wrong about younger people, the Jugglers, those on whose side he purports to be. The levels of inherited wealth have hugely increased due to the property boom, and at the very least, the beleaguered "Jugglers" can expect a handsome cash injection when their parents pass on.
While many younger people are struggling with large mortgages, long commutes and inadequate child care, many have already prevailed on their parents to release equity in their property to fund their own house purchases. This is unfair to both parties, but the inheritance factor is another startling change in people's prospects due to the property boom. The people who have really lost out in the last 10 years are those who lived in our fast-diminishing public housing stock, who have no expectation of inheritance and can't afford to buy for themselves.
MCWILLIAMS IDENTIFIES a number of fault lines which will lead to the end of our boom: over-valued housing, uncompetitive exports, astronomical personal debt, lack of control of immigration, and other countries copying our hitherto successful strategies. All of this is outlined clearly, and he has an excellent chapter which contrasts a property developer making a huge profit without having to risk his own money, with a "Juggler" corporate executive being fired because of downsizing. McWilliams's emotional reactions to capitalism's actual effects on people are far more socialist than the orthodox free market ethos he defaults to when looking at the larger picture.
McWilliams, when you get past his pasteboard stereotypes, is capable of clear explanations for some of our ills, and we need to hear his criticisms about our capacity to borrow and spend well beyond what we can afford, and our naive assumption that this can continue ad infinitum. No boom lasts forever; ours is probably more precarious than most, and we have no control over crucial things such as interest rates or currency values. We need to be thinking ahead to when our unexpected good fortune may desert us.
Unfortunately, at times McWilliams's his grand plan for our salvation falls somewhere between the daft and the risible, with elements which would have pleased Myles na Gopaleen.
He tells us, for example, that the Irish diaspora, with 70 million people in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Argentina, is the answer to our problems, with "soft power", unspecified in its nature, which they will be willing to share with the "mother country" and provide us with a huge global workforce which will keep the good times rolling. The way he suggests that they be persuaded to do this is to replicate the experience of the Gaeltacht which we all allegedly enjoyed so much in our teenage years. The Government, he suggests in all seriousness, should invest vast sums to enable third- and fourth-generation Irish to come here for two weeks and immerse themselves in Irish culture. "All we need is the courage to imagine a greater Ireland that transcends geography, where the country is the mother ship and the tribe is the nation".
IT SEEMS NOT to have struck McWilliams that Irish emigrants, especially those of distant vintage, may be perfectly happy where they are, have strong loyalties to countries which took them or their ancestors in, may have married non-Irish people, and might well see the kind of social engineering he is proposing as patronising, if not half-mad. Many of them would not be happy to be described as a "tribe", longing to help lift off "the mother ship". McWilliams descends from a perfectly good analysis of some of the things wrong with Ireland to this bizarre proposal to purify the dialect of the tribe and get it to help us out in our forthcoming hour of need.
This is a book with two conflicting agendas: one is to demonstrate McWilliams's capacity to categorise people and habits in ways sometimes witty but often tediously stereotypical and, at times, offensive and misogynistic. The charm wears off after the fourth or fifth breezy categorisation. The other agenda is to try to explain how we got where we are, economically, and to posit examples from history (Uruguay in the 1930s, New York in the 1850s) to help us learn from them. His grand solution, alas, does not match the earnest trouble he has taken to make us embrace it.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland and president of the Women's History Association of Ireland
The Generation Game David McWilliams Gill & Macmillan, 296pp. €24.99.