In Search of the Pope's Children

Crania

I menat to watch this as I'm a big fan of David McWilliams, however I forgot all about the show being on. Anyone know if it's being repeated?

quarryman

Yes, anyone know if there will be repeats of this?

kevmy

God I hate McWilliams in these type of pigeon-holing society programmes. He's a smart man and was well able to handle serious issues on the Big Bite and Agenda but these programmes bring out the worst in him. He comes across very D4, upper class and smug. He comes across as a rich man's Eddie Hobbs.
He keeps trying to invent categories to put people in and it doesn't work and is really annoying. It is my deeply held belief that no two people are the same and I hate to see Irish society compressed into these broad strokes which in the main only apply to a minority of people inside Dublin. I haven't yet seen McWilliams refer to country people or people living in a town in Leinster who don't commute to work in Dublin. It's hugely biased and flawed.

TarfHead

There's an active discussion of this on askaboutmoney

I'm sure that it will be repeated (cos it is, after all, on RTE) but not in the foreseeable future (i.e. the 2 week time horizon of www.radiotimes.com)

lostexpectation

kevmy wrote:

God I hate McWilliams in these type of pigeon-holing society programmes. He's a smart man and was well able to handle serious issues on the Big Bite and Agenda but these programmes bring out the worst in him. He comes across very D4, upper class and smug. He comes across as a rich man's Eddie Hobbs.
He keeps trying to invent categories to put people in and it doesn't work and is really annoying. It is my deeply held belief that no two people are the same and I hate to see Irish society compressed into these broad strokes which in the main only apply to a minority of people inside Dublin. I haven't yet seen McWilliams refer to country people or people living in a town in Leinster who don't commute to work in Dublin. It's hugely biased and flawed.

there were no less the five seperate articles that mentioned/berated mcwilliams in the sindo this weekend :rolleyes:

kevmy

lostexpectation wrote:

there were no less the five seperate articles that mentioned/berated mcwilliams in the sindo this weekend :rolleyes:

I didn't read it this week so I didn't get it from there. Anyway I like McWilliams in certain situations but like Eddie Hobbs you can overdose on a person and he seems to be everywhere these days between plugging his book and this. And I hate these type of programmes so I'm probably biased against anyone who fronts one of them.

Wertz

Missed this last night, caught it the week before...regardless of McWilliams (who I like) and his views (which I agree with in some respects) I enjoyed the shwo and what's more, I thought it was very well produced and filmed, something which RTÉ and it's outside production companies seem to not get right nearly as much as they should IMO.

I haven't read McWilliams book, although I'm told I should...I don't like the picture of Ireland he paints in the programme (and probably the book), but it's still pretty accurate as far as I can see.

As for his wanting to generalise people? People can be defined by their general spending habits, especially in regard to economics and for the purposes of examining a countries finances, stereotypes of the kind he uses serve their pupose...
...and with regards to the Dublin-centric slant to the programme....how is he wrong? No-one can deny that the city and it's ever spreading suburbs are the power house behind the whole country's boom...the knock on effects have filtered out to smaller cities and towns (some more than others) but it all still comes back to Dublin (and that comes from a non-Dub) especially construction wise....which as McWilliams points out, accounts for much of what is going on in the economy.


Compare this to Hobbs' pitiful "Spend your SSIA" drivel of a few weeks back...I'll take stuff like this everytime.

kevmy

Wertz wrote:

...and with regards to the Dublin-centric slant to the programme....how is he wrong? No-one can deny that the city and it's ever spreading suburbs are the power house behind the whole country's boom...the knock on effects have filtered out to smaller cities and towns (some more than others) but it all still comes back to Dublin (and that comes from a non-Dub) especially construction wise....which as McWilliams points out, accounts for much of what is going on in the economy.

I understand that Dublin is the centre of the country (ecomonically and politically speaking) and thus deserves more time than any other specific part but the population of Dublin is ~1.1 million in a country of ~4 million. What I'm saying is that it's still the minority of the country and you can't pretend to talk about the whole country by generalising just the Dublin population. There are loads of people who don't see Dublin from one year to the next and have benefitted from the Celtic Tiger. It's a flawed way of doing it is what I'm saying.

Wertz wrote:

Compare this to Hobbs' pitiful "Spend your SSIA" drivel of a few weeks back...I'll take stuff like this everytime.

Agreed that was horrendous and I wouldn't want McWilliams to go down that route.

mickd

Last night was the final programme, overall I enjoyed the series but two programmes were enough as last night he ran out of steam and was rehashing the same ideas. The point about Germans providing free credit could have been made in the two previous programmes.

admiralofthefleet

dont like him, i think he tries to be john bowman a little too much but the program was good apart from the fact that i took offence to being called one of the popes children, (im 25). he did predict the economic boom in the early 90's so after listening to him maybe we should start tightening the belts

mathie

The whole series could be broken down into McWilliams doing a rap.

'Boom-bust cycle! Boom-bust cycle! Boo-boo-boo-boo-boom-bust cycle!'

OFDM

I loved the bit where he awkwardly fondled the woman's breasts. TV gold.

The show was rubbish apart from that....

mickd

OFDM wrote:

I loved the bit where he awkwardly fondled the woman's breasts. TV gold.

Looking at those women the saying "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" comes to mind