David McWilliams - Enough Already....

Stop. Surely it must come to an end soon. The greatest self publicity machine the country has ever seen has gone beyond a joke. Yes, of course, I am referring to Mr Smug 2004/5 David McWilliams and the endless free publicity for his new book that the Irish media seem to be providing. His weekly column in the Sunday Business Post has, for the last 18 months, carried a free ad for it at the end of the column and the content of that column has been used as "trailers" for the book. A once interesting writer has become obsessed with putting smart arse labels on every subset of Irish society. At first some of these were entertaining and had some merit but it now seems he has one for just about every man, woman and child in the country. His latest promo for his book appeared in today's Irish Times (13/12/05) and was an "edited extract" from it. It was a ridiculous piece of smartarsery attacking people who send their children to Gaelscoileanna. McWilliams claims that those who originally sent their children to these schools came from three groups - "the sons and daughters of the Irish speaking aristocracy - a tiny minority of over achievers....", "the children of Gaeltacht people who moved to Dublin" or "they were the leanaí of fáinne wearing Gaelgeoirí zealots". Nothing like a gross and ignorant generalisation to get things started. He moves on to one of his favourite labeled groups the "HiCo" (don't ask) who, apparently, are responsible for the huge surge in popularity of Irish speaking schools. In a long and rambling article seemingly inspired by hanging around at primary schools in Dublin 6 (an odd habit) he gives us various reasons for this popularity but, incredibly, he makes no reference to the notion that maybe, just maybe, some of these parents might want to send their children to these schools because they would like them to be able to speak the Irish langauge. That, I assume, is a far too boring explanation. He even has a go at the fact that many of the parents dropping their children off at these schools do not themselves speak Irish. I'm not sure what his point is here. Is he trying to suggest that anyone who does not speak Irish is somehow not entitled to try and have their children speak it? Bizarre.

It's time he returned to writing about economics, something he has some knowledge of, rather than trying to explain our society to us.