McWilliams & Co: The Celtic Jackals

There’s a Simpsons episode where Homer, after watching The Mask of Zorro, decides that he should settle all his arguments by duelling. The strategy works well for him for a while until an old southern colonel accepts his challenge. He flees to an old family farm where he accidently creates an new, toxically addictive plant called tomacco, gets on the wrong side of those addicted to the product, and flees back to Springfield, only to find the Southern colonel waiting for him.

I had a similar experience just before Christmas. I’d been working on a couple of organic farms in France, having really glad to have been away from all the ugly boorishness that’s accompanied the last ten years of spectacular economic growth. Yet I wasn’t even back in the country for an hour before there was a bus emblazoned with the smug visage of the man who’s appointed himself poet laureate of the Irish economy, David McWilliams.

I’d taken a dislike to this smarmy little know-it-all long before he’d aquired his current guru status among the Irish right. I’ve called him a vile little worm before but then I realised that this is a huge insult to worms, without whom human life would inconceivable, unlike right-wing economists, who we were managing fine without for about 2 million years.

Funny thing was, I didn’t start to hate him until a few days after I saw him in the flesh, assuming he is a human being and not a cyborg developed by the CIA for spreading right-wing propaganda. I vaguely recognised him as that guy from that show on TV3 when he somehow managed to get an interview with Henry Kissinger who was visiting UCC at the time. I was outside in the cold and rain protesting against the presence of the latter, which, sadly is aptly symbolic, though if I’d known more about the former I would have had a few worlds of abuse to shout at him as well.

That Sunday I watched his show hoping to get a glimpse of myself on TV. I wasn’t a big fan before that as I considered it mainly as a forum for his right-wing buddies like Kevin Myers, Shane Ross and Charlie McCreevy to tell the rest of us how great they all were. (bizarrely, he once bagged an interview with Noam Chomsky as well).
That weekend his main interviewee was Mary Harney, who’d also come down to Cork to genuflect at the feet of the man who’d bombed Cambodia back to the stone age. He asked her how she felt about those protesting his presence. She replied that if it had been Gerry Adams there and not Kissinger, we’d all have been at home, and that therefore we were all hypocritical anti-Americans. Astonishingly, he let her get away with such a staggering piece of Orwellian, Fox news double-think, which angered me so much that I never watched his show again. Clearly, I wasn’t alone as he got the heave-ho from TV3 not that long after that, though that might have been more because of the poor production values as the right-wing politics. Or the fact that he talks like comic-book-guy from the Simpsons.

Next time I saw his ugly little face was when he was a guest on TV3’s equally ill-fated Dunphy show. He was debating the merits of the Celtic Tiger with Fintan O Toole who’d written quite a good book on the subject. Fintan used the phrase “right-wing ideology” more than once to describe the government’s prevailing ethos. McWilliams turned his smarminess knob up to 11 and replied “Fintan, you sound like Hilary Clinton. There is no right-wing conspiracy. It’s all in your head.”

Needless to mention, he was also allowed get away with this by Dunphy. He earned the laughs of the crowd and the kudos of the Sunday Independent. Then he went away to write a book about how right he is about everything.

I know mostly about this book from an interview he gave to the Irish Times, which described him as “Cheeky”, as if that made his right-wing views more acceptable. Maybe if Hitler had told a few Jewish mother jokes the Holocaust would have been OK as well. But what annoys me most about the little fucker is not his obnoxious views, his nauseating voice or his insufferable arrogance, it’s the labels he applies to everyone.

Kirkergaard certainly had a point when he said that “He who labels me, negates me.” (Yes, I do know that from watching the first Wayne’s World movie.) But then economics isn’t called the dismal science for nothing. It’s a science that sees us less as living, breathing individuals than as cogs in a machine for generating wealth. That’s why he’s so comfortable labelling those intellectuals who disagree with him as “Confused cosmopolitans” or “Rural Nostalgists”. If he was as eloquent a phrase-maker as he thought he was, it wouldn’t be quite so bad, but when he launches neolgisms like “Malahidilect” and “expectocracy” on an unsuspecting world, you really wish that one of the many SUVs on Dublin’s streets would run him over.

Sadly, that’s not going to happen with all the gridlock on the roads at the moment, so those few of us left outside the Celtic Tiger’s big, coke-filled tent are going to have to fight back with a few vapid clichés of our own. I thought of “Bush babies” to symbolise the Irish Right’s slavish devotion to the moron in the White House, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. “Harney Helpers” is a bit too glib as well. “members of the dissident IDA/NRA” are both a bit to cumbersome. I settled on Celtic Jackals as Jackals are the animals that right-wingers most resemble. It’s often said by those on the right that being left-wing is like a permanent adolescence as we always want what John Bruton called an Improvement for the better and we never accept things the way they are. To me, being Right-wing is like a permanent infantilism where one never grows out of wanting more and more possessions, not caring about the impact of your behaviour on the rest of the world, and screaming blue murder when you don’t get your way about even the slightest thing. (What’s the name of that Ryanair guy?)

McWilliams and his ilk would be content for this country to go the way of the US, where around 15% of the population live in poverty and where 1% of the population are in jail at any given time in spite of the country’s vast wealth. It’s a logical extension of his belief that the happiness of a society can be measured purely by it’s overall wealth, and if you’re poor, well, tough shit, you must be too stupid or lazy.

In the same Irish Times interview he claims that Ireland is receiving 7 times as many immigrants as France, which is a utopia for many Irish “egalitarians” (according to him). Note that he uses the e-word, as if he thought his tongue would be ripped from his mouth by the ghost of Adam Smith if he used the s-word. If he wasn’t a right-wing economist and they weren’t automatically right about everything, I’d say he was way off the mark as France has a far bigger non-indiginous population as we do. I thought of my visit to France living largely outside the cash economy as a big fuck-you to the likes of McWilliams. It’s true that there aren’t as many SUVs or as much Coke in France, but is this really such a bad thing? At least the roads are all fine, the trains run on time and they have done for quite some time. The right won’t ever admit this, but the economic boom isn’t going to go on forever and at the end of it people are going to wish we spent the money improving health and transport instead of blowing it all on big cars, big houses and designer drugs.

Yes, there were cars burnt in France a few months back. It happens in Dublin and Limerick all the time. After all, not everyone has been lifted up by the “wonderbra effect”.

I didn’t read his book, and I’m probably not going to. The first sentence is “Ireland has Arrived”, which says it all, really. Clearly, the fact that many people can afford SUVs is more of an accomplishment to him than millennia of Literature, Music and Art.

In a hundred years time people wont know that Ireland was the third richest country in the world (per capita) for a few years but they will still be reading Ulysses.

But not the vulgarly-titled Pope’s Children.