The Pope’s Children at 20: How Ireland Grew Up

0:00Parles-tu français? Hablas espagnol? Parle italiano? If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Still waiting in line?

0:41Again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

1:12David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:24David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is podcast time and today we have a special anniversary podcast. I wish I had one of those blowers. I wish you had one of those blowers too, John. I always, I lie in bed at night. Anyway, anyway, how are you doing? I hope all is well in your world. The reason we have this anniversary gig today at our little party is because today is the 20th anniversary to the day of the publication of the Pope's Children. Yes. I mean, that is 20 years. 20 years. We are so old. I remember you publishing that and go, oh, look, that's my friend. He's published a book. Exactly. A book of complete nonsense.

2:03David McWilliams: But no, the reason it was, it was, it obviously sold extremely well. It changed, I think, a lot of ways of looking at the country. We did a documentary afterwards on RTE, which went very well. And it's just, it's interesting to just think it's 20 years ago. What was that book about? Why did it capture the imagination? What was the process? But also, why was it so well written, you know? Well, it was so well written because we just cut and paste. This is even before ChatGPT, John. This is when you had to do real research, okay? You had to do absolutely real research. But actually, Mac, you know, you talk about a bestseller.

2:42It absolutely was a bestseller. Something like 130, 140 ,000 copies in Ireland alone. Yes, yeah. I mean, that's phenomenal. But what is interesting, though, Mac, is that the Pope's Children is based on 1979 when the Pope visited and the people conceived around that time. Conceived around that time.

3:05David McWilliams: And they're all, what, 45 years old now? So they're 45 years old now. So the origin story of the book, and I remember when I came up with the title and I gave the title to the publisher and they were like, what are you talking about? I said, no, it's an economics book. It's a sociology book. It's a demographic book. It's an observation about the society. I think the society is changing so rapidly that we have to capture it now. So I started writing it. And again, like what happens when you write your first book, you put these ideas in your head for so long that you can write it very, very quickly.

3:36David McWilliams: You can write it in six or seven weeks. It's like your first album. It is because you've got the tunes written, right? So you've thought about this for a long, long time. You don't realize that they're in your head. You don't realize that they're actually quite mature ideas that you can actually write them from start to finish very, very quickly. The basic idea was, so we had the Celtic tiger and the economy is changing dramatically. and Ireland is changing dramatically. And what I was looking at, what I was really aware of was the emergence of this new class of people who had money for the first time and had lots of money.

4:09And how that was affecting a very, what I would call, stable and kind of stagnant class system here. This is the idea behind the book, was to write about the people I saw in Ireland in front of me going around their daily lives. Because these were a very distinct generation.

4:29David McWilliams: Very distinct generation. And of course, I was writing a bit about their parents as well. Yeah, yeah. But the idea came to me, John. The idea came from me. It was a fusion of two moments. One was when I started as an economist in the central bank, amazing as it is to think about now, we did planning back then. You know the way Ireland doesn't do planning back then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So I remember once being asked by one of the senior economists, I was just a junior lad in there. He said to me, he's the chief economist of the Central Bank. He said, David, over the next couple of weeks, will you look at demographic movements in Ireland?

5:06Will you look at where the economy or where the population has surged? And we're going to try to figure out what year, for example, did the population peak? And if we know that, then we can figure out,

5:17David McWilliams: well, in five years' time, those kids have got to go to school. 10 years' time, they've got to go to secondary school. 12 years time. We've got to do university places, hospital places. So this is the way - And housing. Precisely. And housing and water and infrastructure. This is how you should do economics, right? You should start with, when are the babies being born? Where are those babies going to go? This was, okay, we had no immigration at the time. So it was an entirely sealed Irish ID. Emigration. Emigration, right? So you go and you see a couple of peaks. And then one peak really interests me, which was the actual peak in the post-independence population of this country.

5:56The week the most babies were born in the whole of the history of this country was the third week of June of 1980,

6:06David McWilliams: which was nine months to the day after the Pope came here. So that was the first thing that interests me. It's an aphrodisiac. Exactly. But then it also reminded me of a story when we were kids, right? Yeah. So when all, so we lived, as you know, podcast listeners, we lived on this road and there was, you know, about 500 kids on the road. So there's 100 houses, let's say four or five kids in every house, ranging in ages from people born in the late, very late 50s to let's say the very late 80s. Okay, so that was our road. And all around our road were lots and lots of other roads that were like that.

6:45So big, big sort of states just outside Dun Laoghaire, Monkstown. And the morning of the Pope's Mass, see, I remember this distinctly. We were too young, John. I remember it really well as well.

6:56David McWilliams: But there was a minibus that left Strabbrook Road. And all I remember, right, the sound was the clinking of flagons of cider. Okay. As all the older kids, the late teenagers, went to go camping for the Pope's Mass. Yeah. So this was like a big, this was like Woodstock. This is like Woodstock for Catholics, right? It was like E.T. for a frozen generation. That's a electric picnic. Yes, okay. Now, I remember the time, I was young, but I knew something bad was going to happen. You have all these kids, they're all about 17, 18, 19. They're all getting langared. They're all the way down to the Pope's Mass.

7:35They're all camping together. And then lo and behold, news teetered out a few weeks later that somebody got off the cuff, right?

7:45David McWilliams: Can you imagine getting up the duff at the Pope's Mass, right? So that was always a sort of an apocryphal story in my head as a kid. I used to chuckle at this and whatever, right? And then I realized everyone was doing it at the Pope's, right? So not only were these our mates doing it, our big brother's friends, right? But the data show that the Irish nation responded to the Pope's visit with mass fornication. Okay? Now that is fascinating. It's bizarre, isn't it? It fascinated me as a young fellow. I thought, oh my God, this is interesting. Also, from a sociological point of view, there's a serious point as well, which I think was escaped, or escaped many people when they read the book, was the Catholic Church in Ireland saw the Pope's visit in 1979 as a moment from which they would kick on and this country would become more Catholic.

8:42Yeah. And in the event, the Pope's visit in 1979 was the beginning of the end. Yes, it was. And by 20 years later, the whole thing was over. That always, also when I was writing the book, was a subliminal message. I didn't want to go all sort of sociological department and explain it. I just wanted to leave that in the air. Yeah, the irony of the first time the Pope visits Ireland was... It's the moment it all starts to decline. Yeah.

9:07David McWilliams: And it all starts to decline in the minibus with the background noise of the flagons. Yeah. So that was the thesis, right? Yeah. And then I thought, okay, that's where the idea came from. And that's where the book idea came from because these children were conceived at the time the Pope came. Yeah. So then you look at them and I thought, broadly speaking, you're talking kids who were born, let's say, just on the coming up to the Pope's visit, 1978, 79, and all the way through to the early 80s, that sort of cohort. And there are about 400 ,000 of them. And they were the kids born in 1980. When I started writing this in 2000 and let's say three, four, those kids would have been in their early 20s.

9:52So they were just going to be coming into the labor markets. They are the people who are going to change the country. Yeah. So that was the first thing. So that's the origin story. And then the second thing is I'd been reading a lot of American sociology at the time. And American sociology is really brilliant on what they call longitudinal studies. Yeah. So they've got incredible data. And I was thinking to myself, what are they capturing? What they were capturing, I was reading stuff from the 1950s and 1960s in America, which was the beginning of suburbanization in America. And so I presume one of the reasons the Pope's children did well, it was the first book that celebrated suburbia in Ireland.

10:29Yes. And I've always felt, you and I have always felt, that suburbia is where, not because we're from the suburbs, but there was a sort of slightly snooty perception that only creativity could come either from the gritty inner city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Urban. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, it had to be urban, or it could only come from Connemara. Yeah. Right? A bit of Fairy Fort, Gaelic Ireland, yada, yada. And I thought, no, well, actually, most Irish people live in three-bedroom semis. That's where all the bands came from. That's where all the music, yeah. And they're ambitious. They're on the way up.

11:03Yeah. They're trying to actually get the best for their kids. They're trying to get their kids on. So the real energy of the country comes from three-bedroom estates, semi-detached estates all over the country. Right? And that, again, I suppose, slightly inflamed the commentariat because the commentariat used to think, well, it has to be my left foot or it has to be, you know, Misha. Angela Zashis. Or Misha Ere, that sort of thing. It can't be, you know, something as unglamorous as looking for suburbs. Something as beige. Very beige.

11:37David McWilliams: Love a bit of beige, right? So that was the other general idea. And then, of course, what I wanted to look at was what is emerging out of this suburban society, this new aspirational society. So the way in order to do that was to actually look at where these people are living. So rather than go for the traditional, as I said, gritty inner city stuff, I decided to go to suburbs all over what I called the baby belt. So where all the babies were being born in the early 2000s, who would have been the children possibly of the children who were born in the late 1970s. They were all being born in County Meath, in Kildare, in Wicklow, all those things.

12:25And that's where I realized that the best place to do economic research is not the Department of Economics Trinity. It's not the Department of Finance. It's not some cloister. It was Woody's DIY. one. That's right. And you started identifying these characters, Deckland and Breakfast Roll Man and all these kind of guys.

12:49David McWilliams: So basically, you know, what happened was I decided, okay, taking, there's a great book by a guy called Fussell, called Class. It's an American book, which was a book I read while I was doing, The Pope's Children. The other great book is Bobo's in Paradise by David Brooks, an amazing American journalist. So Fussell and Brooks were the sort of American stuff I was reading. What they gave me the idea that there is beauty in the suburbs. Yeah. There is beauty in people carriers. There's beauty in people, even in a country like Ireland, convincing ourselves that we live in Tenerife and buying barbecues.

13:29There's something beautiful about that,

13:30David McWilliams: that upward social mobility. And where I'd catch all the aspirations. So it was also, once I started to drive around, I spent the summer driving around, the decking came to me. We had just bought a new house, which came with decking. Yes. Apart from splinters in my toes and the decking. Because after about two years, the decking starts to chip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You didn't look after it. We were given, like, we had a barbecue and decking. And I was thinking, it's not just me. The kids were very young. Yeah. And every time we went around to somebody's house after school, they also had decks. So I thought to myself, this must be the thing.

14:12So I remember going to Woody's and asking a fellow, he was a Polish fellow called Wojciech, who was one of my go-to men. And I said, what are you selling most? And literally, there was a torrential downpour outside. And Wojciech says, in the fast-selling thing, barbecue. And I fucking look at him and say, what are you on, man? So the deck landers became people who live in the big estates that were built, all of which came with decks, which was a sign of a social aspiration. But this was also at a time when, you know, the 80s were pretty bad and there was a lot of emigration and all that kind of stuff.

14:52But then the economy started turning around in the 90s. Yeah. And that was the beginnings of the Celtic Tiger. So people had so much more surplus cash to spend on stuff like decks and barbecues and holidays. days and extra flats and houses and places in Bulgaria. And of course the background noise was the property. Yeah. Boom. Right. And I didn't want to write a book. I'd been on TV talking about, you know, the property of boom is going to end. It's awful. I didn't want to write that type of book. I wanted to write a book that was kind of celebratory and kind of suggest to people, look, there's a chapter on why I think the property boom is going to collapse.

15:29But I didn't want to overburden the book with that what i wanted to say is celebrate what's happening so and the reason i wanted to celebrate what's happening is i saw or i thought i saw in the commentary journalism when i'd started doing tv and a kind of a snootiness towards the new class of nouveau riche people right and it's like who do these people think they are yeah and so breakfast romance comes to me i remember coming from whom from writers so all right i remember i remember when, for example, when the Dundrum shopping centre gets opened, right? There were literally, literally weeks of editorials in the papers and, oh, it's awful consumerism, a cathedral to consumerism.

16:11And I was like, fuck it,

16:12David McWilliams: this is what people want, you know what I mean? It's a cathedral to consumerism. It's the one cathedral people have wanted to go into willingly in the last hundred years. And it's just awful, the whole plight of the society, blah, blah, blah. But we had the Dun Laoghaire shopping centre for years. Exactly, but do you remember all those things. There's a sense that all these people of Nouveau-Riche people are awful, and they're common, and they are just buying for the sake of buying, and they're going to New York on their trips, and la la la la la. And I thought, no, this is the story of the country.

16:42David McWilliams: Let's write this story. So I remember one morning, again, deciding to write through characters is a very American way of writing. And it's this idea that the characters kind of, if you get them right, people know exactly what you're talking about yeah yeah so it's the it's the it's 2004 the building boom is on steroids we're building tens of thousands of houses and i am on the long mile road i am in a centra couldn't miss bar or a centra but let's say it was a centra and early morning because i used to go out early morning to to see what was happening to see the country as it was waking up yeah yeah you did the paper round i did yeah i'll tell you about that in a second.

17:23The paper line was crazy. But I remember seeing four lads in a terrible state. And do you remember Cuisine de France? Yeah. Cuisine de France, right? So Cuisine de France bought the license to baguettes off a French company. Yeah. And you can imagine I was thinking the French companies are the Irish, they are buying the cuisine de France. The baguettes, in the baguettes they will put a little bit of drizzly olive oil. Yeah, maybe some brie. Some camembert, I have something beautiful. And then I remember watching these four lads. They're saying, when I have two rashers, five sausages, some black pudding, and some of them beans inside in the baguette place.

18:05And can I have 40 John Player Blue, two of them Lucasites, and a bottle of Acti-Mail plates. Right? And I just thought,

18:14David McWilliams: fuck, there he is. That's him. And a mug of tea. I make it strong. And a big mug of tea, right? And the lads were in the high-vis jackets, right? Hung over to fuck. working on the sites, earning a fortune, living at large, taking drugs, going mad, all that sort of stuff. And I just thought, that's him. Breakfast roll man. He is sitting there and he's eating his breakfast roll. There's four of them. I remember sitting, watching the lads, and they're sitting on the wall of the centre outside, smoking one hand. But Lucas says beside them, eating the breakfast roll. Yeah, yeah. the black pudding and the fry up in the breakfast roll.

18:52And I thought, he's my hero. This is the guy. And it's funny, when you start writing this and you give that chapter to your editor, they realize you've got it. That's Ireland 2004, 2005. These are the people. And then in order to see those things, I was very intrigued at newspaper rounds, John. Yes, yeah.

19:16David McWilliams: and how newspaper rounds, where they were being delivered to, because obviously this is before smartphones. So people read newspapers in huge amounts. So I remember going into, there used to be the Daily Star had its printing works in Terenure. Yeah. And those lads used to leave at three in the morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in order for me to find out where people were actually living, I didn't want to read the glossy brochures by Sherry Fitzgerald. I wanted to follow the Star, where people bought the star in around Leinster. And then it just took you to estates that you'd never heard of before.

19:52Yeah.

19:52David McWilliams: And then I could come back to those estates. So you went off in your high-vis in the back of the van, chucking out the papers out the back. Chucking the papers out the back, yeah, exactly. At five in the morning, five in the morning. And then that got me a sense of, this is where people are living, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you can't get that data. You have to go out. And of course, so that deck landers and the barbecues, the cars, the swanky cars, you know, that all led me to thinking about Ireland as a bit of a class war was going on. Okay. That this new money class of your breakfast roll man and all these people, those characters.

20:34There was also, I remember seeing a girl getting out of her SUV, young girl, young woman. And one thing really struck me, she had a juicy couture tracksuit, which she got out of the tracksuit, and she didn't pull it up, she pulled it down. And I thought, this is a very unusual way, and this is a sort of way of looking at women's fashion, how they were dressing, the nails, all that good stuff. This was even the very, very beginning of girls getting, you know, the lashes, the ones you can pick up Sky Television on,

21:09David McWilliams: those ones, right? And so I went to a lot of beauticians. I hung out with beauticians, see what people were spending money on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting, hang on a second, because it's interesting you talk about the kind of class in Ireland, because I do remember your writing as well about how at this point, we just created lots more so-called middle class, and it was the Wonderbra effect. Yes, the Wonderbra effect was this idea that everyone was pushed in the middle and pushed up. Yes. And this was this kind of wonder by economics. So basically what you were having for the first time ever in Britain, in Italy, in Germany, in France, after the Second World War, you got this extraordinary uplift of people in the middle.

21:56And I thought this didn't happen in Ireland until the 90s and the 2000s. And this, again, was happening to the Pope's children. And also the background noise, because of the property market, there was a character in it called Robo Paddy. And Robo Paddy, you know, Robo Cop used to go around the world, saving the world. Robo Paddy went around the world buying up shit. Yes. And that's when I went to Bulgaria on a trip. Tell us about that one. Well, that, I mean, it was, I went to two places. I went to Bulgaria. I also went to a place called North Shields in Newcastle. A really pretty rough neck of the woods, right?

22:30And there were paddies all over the place. In North Shields? buying English houses like buying rows of council houses and of course all financed by AIB or whatever yeah but I do remember once realising the whole thing was over the robot paddy that I got into a taxi in Dublin and the taxi driver looks at me and he's sitting there and the Dub's GAA jersey the AIG is stretched over his neck he looked like a large blue condom he was all just like stretched over and he says oh sweet jesus it's only our blading self i said yeah hi how are you and yeah he says where are you coming back from i said london and then remember he said to me amata coming back from kusa that see meself last night i said did you that's great and he said after buying five gaffes off plants golf i said really interesting he said golf course coming 2029 he actually referred them is the creme de mante of developments, which was just such a good thing.

23:35And then, but then the greatest line, he says, looks at me, he goes, lovely people, them Greeks.

23:42David McWilliams: And that's the moment I knew it was all over. And he was Robo Paddy and he's in the book, right? And again, it was this idea of Irish people going around the world buying stuff. Yeah, there was so much of that. And then I explained where the credit was coming from, the credit was coming from Germany. And if you could understand that, because a lot of Irish people were thinking, where is all this money coming from? And I was explaining to them the Irish banks had run out of money and they were now borrowing money from the Germans. And it was German money being recycled through Irish banks that was buying stuff in Cusadasi for Dublin taxi drivers.

24:15And that's what I said. I kind of left it there and said, look, there's usually five, six stages of these booms. You just take it as being. But the class thing interests me more because what I really saw was the old middle class threw up all sorts of affectations and barriers to the new middle class. And that was the second part of the book, was the sort of change in the way in which people behaved in the society. Yeah, and saw themselves. Saw themselves. And that's where the term the hyco came from. That came really from David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise. So David Brooks wrote a very good book, I think about 2001, called Bobos in Paradise.

25:03And what was it about was a subsection of the American middle class called the Bohemian Bourgeois. So these are people who were bourgeois, but wanted to live like Bohemians. And I thought this was a really clever idea. And I could see it all over. It's kind of like the hipsters. They were hipsters before hipsters. I could see this happening in Ireland. And what struck me is that because we never had a bourgeois, our big fight in Ireland was between Irish people who felt they were cosmopolitan. Yeah. Who wanted to live in the foreign world, who wanted foreign influences, and who were lined up until the early 2000s dramatically against what I saw, Irish people who wanted Hibernian influences.

25:52So the Irish language, the Catholic Church to a degree, nationalism, Ireland first, all that sort of stuff that was always there. And when we were children, John, the conflict in Ireland was always between people who wanted the cosmopolitan world, we wanted the influences from America, from England, France, the new, and those who wanted the Hibernian world, the old, the stable, the devil era. But then what intrigued me was we we were beginning to see a fusion of these two together. Like the Bohemian bourgeois, the Hibernians and the cosmopolitans were now kind of, they had a truce together and they were becoming the sort of, what I would call the taste class.

26:34And they looked down their nose at the decklanders. And as a result of that, there was a whole second part of the book written about the habits of this hope bourgeoisie, who I called Hycos, which is half Hibernian, half cosmopolitan. Yeah, and it's that kind of, you looking at the kind of class system in Ireland, which is very unique and very different to class systems, say, in the UK or anywhere else. You're right, it's very different. The class system in Ireland is much more subtle, but I actually think it is as delineated. Really? Yeah, I do. I think the English class system is more honest.

27:15I think, you know, a posh Brit is a posh Brit, you know, public educated, and they're obsessed by what class you are, you middle class, whatever. We are more subtle. We're more likely to try to convince ourselves that we're all broadly the same class. That, you know, the aristocracy was got rid of, let's say, in 1921. The sort of, let's say, the very British aristocracy disappeared. We were all poor together. I don't believe that for one single bit. I think that there are enormous class, You know tells in poker. A fella has a tell in poker. You can sense where I think the class tells in Ireland are unbelievably succinct.

27:58I think they're accurate. I think they are alarming. I think they're everywhere. And I think in that very urge to compress the class system, we're creating a new nation of Irish people and we're all going to be independent together. that very compression of the class system leaked into areas where class screams education, what people eat, how they eat, where they travel to, what types of, you know, I remember talking about the way that people say, oh, I went on holidays to Kazakhstan. Oh, really? You went to Kazakhstan?

28:38David McWilliams: I went to New York myself. and straight away what the person is saying I'm a sort of Kazakhstani Atlas Mountains in tune with nomadic people type of person whereas you're just a pleb who go to Mallorca right so the money because people had money when everybody has money the class system recalibrates to send signals of well how do you spend that money on what do you spend that money so the second half of the book I think was the more contentious part because it sort of needled possibly the people who might have been reading the book. Yeah. And it was a little bit of a piss take. It didn't make you very popular.

29:24Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, yeah. You came in for a lot of shtick, didn't you? Yeah, well, I suppose you have to. I mean, I think the whole point of being a public commentator is that if you don't take shtick, you're not doing your job properly. So 20 years on from publishing the book, what do you think the lessons are then for Ireland and for Irish society? But before we answer that, let's go and do a bit of this.

30:32The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, Finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Real winning means showing up stronger, faster, better than before. The drop by GNC cuts through the noise, bringing you the best new innovations in performance and nutrition. From strength and recovery to endurance and focus, you're always leveling up. The Drop by GNC. What's new?

31:10What works? What's next?

31:15So 20 years on, Mac, from publishing The Pope's Children, sold 140 ,000 copies in Ireland alone. That population are now in their 40s. So are there lessons from this generation and from the book?

31:32David McWilliams: I don't know if the lessons are huge. I mean, I think maybe the reason it did well was something like this had never been done before. Yeah, yeah. In Ireland. Yeah. I think the reason it was probably never done before in Ireland was because, as you said at the end there, the first part, I got a lot of stick. You know, you create a lot of enemies doing this. Yeah, we gave you loads of wedgies. My dad did say to me, I remember because I was getting a lot of stick and I got a bit upset and I came home and I was sitting in the kitchen and dad just looked at me and he said, look, he said, say, so you've got enemies.

32:06He said, show me a man with no enemies and I'll show you a man with no backbone. And it was a really, really... He was a great man, Tez.

32:15David McWilliams: It's a wise thing to say. You have enemies because you stand for something. Because you actually get up and say, you know what, I think this is the way the world is. So I think what it probably did is it precipitated a couple of copycats sort of writing that people thought okay you can write this way yeah you can take sociological trends you can take musical trends you can take pop culture you can take real hard economic data you can be playful you can be a bit silly you can be a bit bitchy you know yeah and you can paint a picture of a society like a day in life like a snapshot yeah you know and I think so that's the lesson was that you know there was a way of writing i had never thought that's a lesson for you but for for commentators for writers for journalists that you know i'd never thought that you could actually write like this and would sell that you could be very playful and you could be extremely engaged with your subject and engaging hopefully you know so for example i i went around with a bouncy castle fella, a real fella.

33:24David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I love the notions of bouncy castles. And the reason I love the notions of bouncy castles, this is what you'll absolutely love, is that both our kids are born in May. Yeah. And Sian would be very meticulous. And Sian would have always been somebody who would say, okay, we're going to have a party in the back garden beside the deck and we're going to get a bouncy castle, right? And have a barbecue for the adults. No, no, yeah, exactly. Barbecue for the adults, drinking rolling rock. Like all these things that really intrigue me. These are the signs, right? And all these people are, but Shan would start going mad about three weeks or four weeks before the birthday of Lucy and Cal.

34:00And I'd say, why? And she'd say, there are no bouncy castles. I'd say, how do you mean there's no bouncy castles?

34:08David McWilliams: So Shan is from the community in the North that don't have communions. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she didn't realize that the first three weeks of May, when our two children were born, is communion season. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way in which... It could be bigger than Christmas. The way in which good, law-abiding Catholics celebrate communions is with a fuck-off bouncy castle. Right? The bigger, the better. Fill the kids full of sugar, chuck them on the bouncy castle, and then see what happens. And then see what happens. And then the parents all get langered, right? But so Sian was sitting there thinking, what's the story?

34:45David McWilliams: There's a run of bouncy castle. I said, no, Sian, I'm going to introduce you. to living in the Republic. Yeah. The biggest month is May, and that's communion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So because of that, I decided, okay, well, to get a sense of who's buying the bouncy castles, you have to go with the bouncy castle, man. Yeah. So I went around for three weekends in May to all the bouncy castles all around, West Dublin and North Dublin, and actually North Cork, he went around as well. And it was just a hoot. So that sort of way of looking at it, I think the only lesson is that What comes out of the suburbs is the nation.

35:24Yeah. And that's the same today as it was then. So if you want to understand what's happening in Ireland, go to the suburbs, travel around, open your eyes. I traveled around for about a year with a notebook, just taking notes and doing that sort of on the ground sociological research. I call it pop sociology. Kind of, you know, make you up in sociology. And I think that's the important thing because, But the last thing, John, is that generations are affected differently. And that, I think, is the lesson. So an Irish person at 60 and an Irish person at 40 and an Irish person at 20 have totally different life experiences.

36:05Yeah. So, for example, a great example of that is the 2008 crash. So we experienced it as adults. Yeah. Our friends experienced it as adults who lost their jobs. their kids our kids experienced it as children whose dads and mums lost their jobs our parents experienced something quite remote that happened to other people right but they had the trauma of looking at their kids but so this is one event yeah right this is one snapshot okay I always think the greatest snapshot in the world is Saipan where were you when Roy walked out of the football team right different generations are differently affected yeah and so you take it right now the pandemic our generation has not been as badly affected by the pandemic as our children absolutely and we don't know just yet how that will play out we're not sure just yet yeah yeah we know that there's not just mental health issues there's lots of issues about grit by grit i mean this younger generation that lived through the pandemic's ability to actually go through hard times seems to have been changed dramatically.

37:14So what the Pope's children, the lesson from that is you can take a moment in time, like the day the Pope arrived. You can see what official Ireland wanted. They wanted this to be the peak of a phase of Catholicism and we would kick on and become a fundamentalist Catholic Republic, right? That's what they wanted.

37:37David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the event, it was the beginning of the end. People just said, no, fuck it. I don't want that anymore, right? And it went, as my mother would say, like snow off a ditch, it was gone, right? Yeah. But so you take that one event and you look at through the prism of various different generations. And that, I suppose, is the lesson that when we're talking about economic history, what we're talking about economic history for one generation, what I like to do is look at for three generations. So the pandemic, how has that really affected people? House prices now, how is that affecting people?

38:16Immigration, migration to Australia, how is that affecting the generation? The generation of there are liking it. Their parents are on Zoom all the time, missing them. Their younger brothers and sisters are influenced by that. Everybody comes to the table with different experiences. And I suppose if that was the lesson, if there was a serious lesson in the Pope's children, It was to look at generational experience rather than general experience. Yeah. Because there is no general experience. Let me ask you one final thing very quickly. So you followed the Pope's children with a number of other books.

38:56Yeah, yeah. You know, follow the money and the good room. The generation game and the good room and all those.

39:00David McWilliams: Yeah. And the Renaissance Nation was very much like that too. Yeah, absolutely. But your last book. Oh, Money. Money. would you have been able to write money without having written the Pope's children? That's a really good question. No way. No way. Like writing is like, it's like doing keepy uppies. You become better at it. Like Catherine Connolly. She becomes better at it. She's going to be the Maradona of presidents, right? No, it's like writing is like anything. You become better at it. You become less flabby with the words. You know how to write, construct the paragraphs. You become more ambitious.

39:36And I just thought on money that it was time to write a book outside of Ireland. It was time to look. Bigger picture stuff. Yeah, and also I've probably been thinking about money for a long, long time. Yeah. And it just came to me over a period of years. But you're absolutely right. It's like anything, you know, it's like playing an instrument. You get better the more you use it. Your muscle memory, your mental muscle memory, it just becomes better. Yeah. And becomes, you hope, more creative. Yeah. Now, that might not necessarily be the case, but... But it was also a resource that you could dip into.

40:10You know, you'd done so much reading and research in Ireland. And as I say, you know, I believe it here, you know.

40:16David McWilliams: It's better than a real job.

40:38Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. We all know winning means showing up stronger, faster, better than before. And when you're chasing that edge, the drop by GNC cuts through the noise, bringing you the best new innovations in sports nutrition and performance.

41:21From muscle building and strength support to improved recovery and focus, we curate the newest drops from GNC Amp, Pro Performance, and Mega Man. Plus, Ghost, Raw Nutrition, Bucked Up, and the top new brands changing the game. No guesswork, just leveling up. Check out The Drop by GNC for what's new, what works, and what's next.