An unflinching look at the new, prosperous Ireland
The Pope’s Children
By David McWilliams
Wiley, 291 pp., $24.95
Most people who love Ireland fell in love with the one that used to be desperately poor, ridiculously friendly, and breathtakingly beautiful.
David McWilliams's brilliant, eminently readable "The Pope's Children" is about a different Ireland, a modern one, the postmodern one, where the poor are now rich, the friendly are too busy to be as friendly, and that verdant green quilt of countryside is dotted with vacation homes of wealthy Dubliners who barely use them because they've also purchased property in Bulgaria and they're on holiday in Spain or a shopping weekend in New York or Boston.
An economist by training, McWilliams explains the revolutionary, evolutionary change in the Irish, from the post-colonial pessimists who were perpetually poor to the unbridled optimists whose ambition and consumerism drove the Celtic Tiger, the most robust economy in the Western world for more than a decade.
"One hundred years ago, the perfect image of the Irish was a doodeen-smoking, seaweed-picking, bare-footed peasant, smiling in bewilderment for some well-meaning English anthropologist who has just measured the circumference of his cranium," he writes. Today, "a perfect snapshot of the Irish is of a man in an expensive, ill-fitting suit, hands-full, driving or maybe carrying a child distractedly, barking orders down a mobile [phone] on an English-owned network."
It is an unflinching account, paying tribute to the rising tide that lifted all boats and created a real, bulging middle class, while highlighting some of the less attractive byproducts of prosperity - young people who abuse alcohol more than their European peers, rampant materialism, mad traffic, and long commutes on formerly quiet, bucolic roads. The Irish, McWilliams says, are fatter, drunker, and happier than ever.
"We are Europe's hedonists," he writes, "and the most decadent Irish generation ever."
The book's title refers to the generation of Irish born after Pope John Paul II arrived to a rapturous welcome in 1979. The Irish baby boom peaked exactly nine months after the pope's visit. If one Pole inspired so many Irish babies, it is perhaps only fitting that Ireland, especially its capital, is crawling with Polish workers, as the booming economy has attracted economic migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa, and China. Ireland, meanwhile, has become a much more secular country, a place where the pope these days would have been regarded as just another guy from Krakow.
The book, initially published in 2005 in Ireland, was written largely for an Irish audience, and some of the references - "Ivana Bacik meets Dana," i.e., a left-wing law professor and a staunchly Catholic singer - will be lost on someone without an intimate knowledge of contemporary Ireland. McWilliams can at times be too fond of his metaphors, repeating pithy catch phrases so often that they become decidedly less pithy.
But this book is indispensable for those who want to understand how Ireland went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest in such a remarkably short period of time, and how this has dramatically changed the age-old question of what it means to be Irish. In a land once known for producing saints and scholars, McWilliams captures the contradiction that is a prosperous, materialist Ireland.
"There was a fundamental shift in our culture that could not be ascribed to money, immigration or politics," he writes. "Old conservative Ireland has become a magnet for pagan New Age travellers and old liberal Ireland is brimming with evangelical Christians."
Begrudgery is a characteristic that has survived and thrived alongside the Celtic Tiger. Bono once described the difference between Ireland and America thus: In America, if someone sees a guy driving a nice new car, they say, "I'm gonna get one of those." In Ireland, they say, "I'm gonna get him." In keeping with that, McWilliams takes particular delight in calling out the doomsayers who have predicted disaster even as the Irish economy hums along. But even he acknowledges a dip in property prices, which have skyrocketed in recent years, could make things dicey.
McWilliams concludes that despite the materialism and hedonism, there has also been a revival in Irish culture, especially the language, which used to be forced on a reluctant populace by the government, but is now being embraced by a people who with all their success are perhaps more determined to hold onto something that resides in their soul, not their bank account.
When it comes to Ireland, it's still a beautiful place with friendly people, but everything has changed. Changed utterly. McWilliams could have called his book "A Terrible Beauty." Alas, that title was already taken.
