As the saying goes, life is a game. But in a country of winners, it’s important to remember it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play that matters.

Erin go brath! Ireland has changed a great deal in the last decade. The Troubles, in their most virulent form at least, are over. The reprehensibly firm grip the Catholic Church once held is ended. The implementation of the liberal agenda, with the introduction of divorce and contraception, seems near complete. And to top it all off, we’re stinking rich! It’s taken a while, but generations of Irish people are beginning to emerge that are, well, at ease with themselves. “The IR who? Eamon Casey the what? No condoms!? You’re mad! Shut up and have a Mocha”. All in all, there is a lot of happy talk, the kind of thing comedian Des Bishop refers to as “pozshuhtivitee”. To borrow a phrase from a former enemy across the water, Irish people are ‘well chuffed’ these days.

David McWilliams, economist, lecturer and broadcaster extraordinaire, celebrates this in his new book The Pope’s Children, Ireland’s New Elite. It’s an insightful, amusing and, most important, provocative analysis of a country in transition. It undoubtedly captures the mood of a certain demographic. Essentially, two points are made. One, the Celtic Tiger is being primarily fueled by credit. Is this good or bad? Who knows. As McWilliams himself says, make up your own mind. The second is that it has created two “tribes”. 70% of us have experienced the “Wonderbra effect”, a compression of the population into a massive middle class called Decklanders. In reaction to these have emerged the Hicos, the new elite of the title. Pozshuhtivitee all around then eh!

Not quite. As we all know, Catholic clergy are bound by a vow of celibacy, and so the Pope has no children. Though outdated, the vow is symbolic of a clergy person’s dedication to the truth. There are of course many truths. One of these is that recently published figures for 2004 from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show 7% of the population here living in “consistent poverty”. This is defined by the European Union as income relative to basic resources. Two examples of such resources include access to “two pairs of strong shoes” or “new (not second hand) clothes”. So, at least 287,000 people in the Celtic Tiger endured wet shoes and mothballed sweaters for the greater part of that year. In addition, the risk of poverty, of which we have the highest in the EU according to the EU Commission, was halved only because of basic social welfare provisions, and there’s been “no change” from the 2003 finding that the top income group had five times more income than the bottom. And to top it all off, a whopping 87% of persons aged 65 and over were found to be at risk of poverty.

There are of course many, many different ways to calculate these things. According to The Pope’s Children, the Gini coefficient is the standard international tool in measuring income inequality. It shows “we are actually closer to nice Denmark than to the nasty US in terms of spreading our wealth”. Income inequality is not the same thing as wealth inequality though. It is widely acknowledged that the Gini coefficient is of no use in measuring the latter, particularly when comparing a small country like Ireland with a large one like the US. Of course, as McWilliams points out, Ireland is now a meritocracy. And in a meritocracy “if you are poor, there is something wrong with you, personally”.

As mentioned, comparisons between Ireland and the US are unhelpful in ways, mainly because of disparities in size and scale. Yet Ireland is referred to in The Pope’s Children as an “Ameropean” society. What does this mean exactly? Presumably, a society exhibiting elements of both America and Europe, (if indeed there is such a thing as the latter). In June 2005 the CSO estimated that 9 per cent of immigrants are Chinese and 8 per cent are nationals from Central and Eastern Europe. This accounts for 17%, nearly one fifth, of all immigrants. Might Ireland therefore not also be described as a Chinopean society? Ask the opinion of the cashier behind the counter in Centra (because s/he won’t be there for long). Globalisation and the global blurring are not about to happen; they have happened already. And, there’s nothing new in this. If Strongbow were alive, he’d have come by boat alright, but he would still be working in Centra to begin with. Describing people in terms of tribes, be they Hibernian Cosmopolitans or Decklanders, is antiquated - a remnant, as McWilliams reminds us, of a time when sociopolitical and religious stratification ruled the roost - and dangerous. The IR who or the Muslim Council of France will tell you this.

Wonderbra, Deckland, Hicos. Stylish terms or wha’, loike? They certainly tell a story, but perhaps not one familiar to people in Ballymun, Dublin or South Hill, Limerick. People, not Hicos or Decklanders, are born all the time, everywhere. Some see better ones than others, but in this life, most still don’t. The Pope’s Children does acknowledge the existence of a “modest by international standards” underclass. But poverty and exclusion, as Des Bishop, Bono and John Paul (the Roman, not the Hiclander) continually remind us, are universal phenomenon, not international. Economic theory and statistics are an invaluable asset to the efficient function of the free market. But, like everything else, they can be manipulated. One survey says we’re happy. Fine. But to spite another saying the Irish language is an integral part of being Irish, and then compare “Hico” access to Gaelscoileanna with non access of white Americans to Indian American reservations….well, make up your own mind.