The Pope’s Children at 20: How Ireland Grew Up

To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by ACAST. How are you doing there? It is podcast time and today we have a special anniversary podcast. I wish I had one of those blowers. I wish you had one of those blowers too, John. I always lie in bed at night. Anyway, how you doing? I hope all is well in your world. The reason we have this anniversary gig today in our little party is because today is the 20th anniversary to the day of the publication of the Pope's children. Yes. I mean, that is 20 years. 20 years. John, we are so old. I remember that you publishing that and go, "Oh, look, there's my friend. He's published a book." Exactly. A book of complete nonsense, but the reason it was, it obviously sold extremely well. It changed, I think, a lot of ways of looking at the country. We did a documentary afterwards on Ortie East, well, very well, and it's interesting to think it's 20 years ago. What was that book about? Why did it capture the imagination? What was the process? Why was it so well-written? Well, it was so well-written because we just cut and pasted, this is even before Chatshipy T. John. This is when you had to do real research. You had to do absolutely real research. But actually, Mac, you talk about a best-seller, it absolutely was a best-seller. Something like 130, 140,000 copies in Ireland alone. Yes. Yes. I mean, that's phenomenal. The first thing, though, Mac, is that the Pope's children is based on 1979, when the Pope visited and the people conceived around that time. Conceived around that time. And they're all, what, 45 years old now? They're 45 years old now. So the origin story of the book, and I remember when I came up with the title, and I gave the title to the publisher, and they were like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "No, it's an economics book, it's a sociology book, it's a demographic book, it's an observation about the society. I think the society is changing so rapidly that we have to capture it now." So I started writing it, and again, like, what happens when you write your first book? You've got these ideas in your head for so long that you can write it very, very quickly. You can write it in six or seven weeks. It's like your first album. It is, because you've got the tunes written, right? You've thought about this for a long, long time. You don't realize that they're in your head, you don't realize that they're actually quite mature ideas, that you can actually write them from start to finish very, very quickly. The basic idea was, so we had the Celtic Tiger, and the economy is changing dramatically, and Ireland is changing dramatically. And what I was looking at, what I was really aware of, was the emergence of this new class of people who had money for the first time and had lots of money. And how that was affecting a very, what I would call, stable and kind of stagnant class system here. So the idea behind the book was to write about the people I saw in Ireland in front of me going around their daily lives. These were a very distinct generation. Very distinct generation. And of course, I was writing a bit about their parents as well, right? So but the idea came to me, John, the idea came to me as a fusion of two moments. One was when I started as an economist in the central bank, amazing as it is to think about now, we did planning back then, you know, Ireland doesn't do planning, right? So I remember once being asked by one of the senior economists, I was just a junior lad in there. He said to me, he's the chief economist of the central bank, he said, David, over the next couple of weeks, will you look at demographic movements in Ireland? Will you look at where the economy or where the population has surged? And we're going to try to figure out what year, for example, did the population peak? And if we know that, then we can figure out, well, in five years time, those kids are going to go to school, 10 years time, they're going to go to secondary school, 12 years time, we've got to give them university places, hospital places. So this is the way and housing precisely and housing and water and infrastructure. This is how you should do economics, right? You should start with when are the babies being born? Where are those babies going to go? This was okay. We had no immigration at the time. So it was an entirely sealed Irish immigration. So you go and you see a couple of peaks and then one peak really interests me, which was the actual peak in the post-independence population of this country. The week the most babies were born in the whole of the history of this country was the third week of June of 1980, which was nine months to the day after the pope came here, right? So that was the first thing that interests me. It's an affidavit. Exactly. But then it also reminded me of a story when we were kids, right? So we lived, as you know, podcast listeners, we lived on this road and there was, you know, about 500 kids on the road. So there's a hundred houses, let's say four or five kids in every house, ranging in ages from people born in the late, very late fifties to, let's say, the very late eighties. Okay. So that was our road. And all around our road were lots and lots of other roads that were like that. So big, big sort of states just outside Dunleary, Mungstown. And the morning of the pope's mass, you see, I remember this distinctly. We were too young, John. I remember it really well as well. But there was a minibus that left Strablek Road. And all I remember, right? The sound was the clinking of flagons of cider, okay? As all the older kids, the late teenagers, went to go camping for the pope's mass. So this was like a big, this was like Woodstock, this is like Woodstock for Catholics, right? It was like, it was like E-key for a frozen generation. That's a electric picnic. Yes. Okay. So at that time, I was only, I was young, but I knew something bad was going to happen. Yeah. You've all these kids, they're all about 17, 18, 19, they're all getting langered. They're all the way down to the pope's mass. They're all camping together. Yeah. And then lo and behold, news cheatered out a few weeks later, that somebody got off the duff. Right? Yeah. Imagine getting off the duff at the pope's mass, right? So that was always a sort of an apocryphal story in my head as a kid. I used to chocolate this and whatever, right? And then I realized everyone was doing it at the pope's, right? So not only were these our mates doing it, our big brother's friends, right? Yeah. But, but the data show that the Irish nation responded to the pope's visit with mass fornication. Okay? Now that is fascinating. It's bizarre, isn't it? It fascinated me as a young fellow. I thought, oh my God, this is interesting. So from a sociological point of view, there's a serious point as well, which I think was escaped or escaped many people and they read the book, was the Catholic Church in Ireland saw the pope's visit in 1979 as a moment from which they would kick on and this country would become more Catholic. Yeah. And in the event, the pope's visit in 1979 was the beginning of the end. Yes, it was. And by 20 years later, the whole thing was over. And also when I was writing the book was a subliminal message. I didn't want to go all sort of sociological department and explain it. I just wanted to leave that in the air. Yeah. The irony of the first time the pope visits Ireland was... It's the moment when all the fuss is declined and it's all such declined in the minibus with the background noise of the flagans. Yeah. So that was the thesis, right? Yeah. And then I thought that's great. That's where the idea came from and that's where the book idea came from because these children were conceived at the time, the pope. Okay? Yeah. So then you look at them and I thought broadly speaking, you're talking kids who were born, let's say between just on the coming up to the pope's visit, 1978, '79 and all the way through to the early '80s, that sort of cohort and there are about 400,000 of them. And they were the kids born in 1980. When I started writing this in 2000 and let's say three, four, those kids would have been in their early twenties. So they were just going to be coming into the labor market. They are the people who are going to change the country. Yeah. So that was the first thing. So that's the origin story. And then the second thing is I've been reading a lot of American sociology at the time and American sociology is really brilliant at what they call longitudinal studies. So they've used incredible data and I was thinking to myself, what are they capturing? What they were capturing... So I was reading stuff from the 1950s and 1960s in America, which was the beginning of suburbanization in America. And so I presume one of the reasons that Pope's children did well, it was the first book that celebrated suburbia in Ireland. Yes. And I've always felt, to you and I've always felt that suburbia, not because we're from the suburbs, but there was a sort of a slightly snooty perception that only creativity could come either from the gritty inner city... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Urban. Yeah, yeah. It had to be urban or it could only come from Connemara. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So I've been to Ferry Fort, Gaelic Ireland, Yadiria. And I thought, no, well, actually, most Irish people live in three-bedroom semis in the suburbs. That's where all the bands came from. That's where all the music, yeah. And they're ambitious. They're on the way up. Yeah. They're trying to actually get the best for their kids. They're trying to get their kids on. So the real energy of the country comes from three-bedroom states, semi-detached states, all over the country. Yeah. Right? And that again, I suppose, slightly inflamed the commentariat, because the commentariat used to think, well, it has to be my left foot or it has to be, you know, Misha... And it's in the Jaxus. Or Misha-era. Yeah, yeah. That sort of thing. Yeah. It can't be, you know, something as unglamorous as looking for suburbs. So there's beige. There's very beige. Love a bit of beige, right? So that was the other general idea. And then, of course, what I wanted to look at was what is emerging out of this suburban society, this new aspirational society. So the way in order to do that was to actually look at where these people are living. So rather than go for the traditional, as I said, gritty inner-city stuff, I decided to go to suburbs all over what I call the baby belt. So where all the babies were being born in the early 2000s, who would have been the children possibly of the children who were born in the late 1970s, they were all being born in County Meath, in Kildare, in Wicklow, all those things. And that's where I realized that the best place to do economic research is not the department of economics, Trinity. It's not the department of finance. It's not some cloister. It was Woody's DIY. That's right. And you started identifying these characters, Declan and Breakfast Roll Man and all these kind of guys. So basically, what happened was I decided, OK, there's a great book by a guy called Fusel called Class. It's an American book, which was a book I read while I was doing The Pope's Children. The other great book is Bobos and Paradise by David Brooks, an amazing American journalist. So Fusel and Brooks were the sort of American stuff I was reading. What they gave me the idea that there is beauty in the suburbs. There is beauty in people carriers. There's beauty in people, even in a country like Ireland, convincing ourselves that we live in tenor reef and buying barbecues. There's something beautiful about that, that upward social mobility and where I capture all the aspirations. So it was also, once I started to drive around, I spent the summer driving around, the decking came to me. We had just bought a new house, which came with decking, apart from splinters in my toes and the decking. Because after about two years, the decking starts to chip, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You did look after it like that. Yeah, we were given, like, yeah, at a barbecue and decking, and I was thinking, it's not just me. The kids were very young. And every time we went around to somebody's house after school, they also had decks. So I thought to myself, this must be the thing. So I remember going to Woody's and asking a fellow, he was a Polish fellow called Wojciech, who was one of my, who was one of my go-to men. And I said, what are you selling most? And literally, there was a torrential downpour outside, and Wojciech says, the fast selling thing, barbecue. And I fucking look at him, I say, what are you on, man? So the decklanders became people who live in the biggest states that were built, all of which came with decks, which was a sign of a social aspiration. But this was also at a time when, you know, the 80s were pretty bad and there was a lot of emigration and all that kind of stuff. But then the economy started turning around in the 90s. And that was the beginnings of the Celtic Tigers, so people had so much more surplus cash to spend on stuff like decks and barbecues and holidays and extra flats and houses and places in Bulgaria. And of course, the background noise was the property, boom, and I didn't want to write a book. I'd been on TV talking about, you know, the property of Booms is going to end awful. I didn't want to write that type of book. I wanted to write a book that was kind of celebratory and kind of suggest to people, look, there's a chapter on why I think the property boom is going to collapse. But I didn't want to overburden the book with that. What I wanted to say is celebrate what's happening. So and the reason I wanted to celebrate what's happening is I saw or I thought I saw in the commentary journalism when I'd started doing TV and kind of a snootiness towards the new class of Nouveau-Riche people. Right. Who do these people think they are? Yeah. And so breakfast roll man comes to me. I remember. Coming from whom? From writers. Oh, right. I remember when, for example, when the Dundrum shopping centre gets opened, right, there were literally, literally weeks of editorials in the paper saying, oh, it's awful, consumerism, a cathedral to consumerism. Yes. And I was like, fuck it, this is what people want, you know what I mean, like, it's a cathedral to consumerism. It's the one cathedral people have wanted to go into willingly in the last hundred years. Yeah. And it's just awful, the whole, the pride of the society, blah, blah, blah. I think we had the Dundliri shopping centre for years. Exactly. But do you remember all those things? Yeah. There's a sense that all these people of Nouveau-Riche people are awful and they're common and they are just buying for the sake of buying and they're going to New York on their trips and la, la, la, la, and I thought, no, this is the story of the country. Yeah. Let's write the story. So I remember one morning, again, deciding to write through characters is a very American way of writing. And it's this idea that the characters kind of, if you get them right, people know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's the, it's 2004, the building boom is on steroids, we're building tens of thousands of houses. And I am on the Long Mile Road, I am in a centre, couldn't this bar, or a centre? Well, let's say it was a centre and it's early morning, because I used to go out early morning to see what was happening, to see the country as it was waking up. Yeah, yeah. You did the paper round once. I did. Yeah, I'll tell you about that in a second. The paper round was crazy, but I remember seeing four lads in terrible state. And do you remember Cuisine de France? Yeah. Cuisine de France, right? So Cuisine de France bought the licence to baguettes off a French company. Yeah. And you can imagine, I was thinking, the French companies, oh, and the Irish, they are buying the Cuisine de France, the baguettes, in the baguettes, they will put a little bit of drizzly olive oil, some camembert, or something in beauty foil. And then I remember watching these four lads, they're saying, when I tear out our five sausages, some black pudding, and some of them beans inside in the baguette place. And when I have 40 John Player blue, two of them leucocytes, and a bottle of Actimal Place. Yeah. And I just thought, fuck, there he is. That's him. And a mug of tea. And make it strong. A mug of tea, right? And the lads were in the Javier's jackets, hungover to fuck, working on the sites, earning a fortune, living it large, taking drugs, going mad, all that sort of stuff. And I just thought, that's him, breakfast roll man. He is sitting there, and he's eating his breakfast roll. There's four of them, I remember watching the lads, and they're sitting on the wall of the centre outside, smoking one hand, bottle of leucocytes beside them, eating the breakfast roll. The black pudding and the fry up in the breakfast roll, and I thought, he's my hero, this is the guy. And it's funny, when you start writing this, and you give that chapter to your editor, they realise, you've got it, that's Ireland 2004, 2005, these are the people. And then in order to see those things, I was very intrigued at newspaper rounds, John. Yes, yeah. And how newspaper rounds, where they were being delivered to, because obviously this is before smartphones. So people read newspapers, huge amounts. So I remember going into the, we used to be, the Daily Star had its printing works in Terenure. Yeah. And those lads used to leave at three in the morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In order for me to find out where people were actually living, I didn't want to read The Glossy Brochures by Sherry Fitzgerald, I wanted to follow the star, where people bought the star in Around Lenster. And then it just took you to estates that you'd never heard of before. And then I could come back to those estates. Do you went off in your high viz in the back of the van, chucking out the papers out the back? Chucking the papers out the back, yeah, exactly, at five in the morning, five in the morning, and then that got me a sense. Very low, he opened her up. People are living, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you can't get that data. You have to go out. And of course, so that decklanders and the barbecues, the cars, the swanky cars, you know, that all led me to thinking about Ireland as a bit of a class war was going on. Okay. That this new money's class of your breakfast roll man and all these people, those characters, there was also, I remember seeing a girl getting out of her SUV, young girl, young woman. And one thing really struck me, she had a juicy couture tracksuit, which she got out of the, out of the tracksuit, and she didn't pull it up. She pulled it down. And I thought, this is a very unusual way. And this is a sort of way of looking at, looking at women's fashion, how they were dressing, the nails, all that good stuff. This was even the very, very beginning of girls getting, you know, the lashes, the ones you can pick up sky television on, those sorts of things. And so I went to a lot of beauticians, I hung out with beauticians, seeing what people were spending money on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. But it's interesting. Hang on a second. Because it's interesting you talk about the kind of class in Ireland, because I do remember your writing as well about how at this point, we just created a lots more so-called middle class. And it was the Wonder Brow Effect. Yes. The Wonder Brow Effect was this idea that everyone was pushed in the middle and pushed up. Yes. And this was this kind of Wonder Brow economics. So basically what you were having for the first time ever in Britain, in Italy, in Germany, in France, after the Second World War, you got this extraordinary uplift of people in the middle. And I thought this just, this didn't happen in Ireland until the nineties and the 2000s. And this again was happening to the Pope's children. And also, the background noise, because of the property market, there was a character in it called RoboPuddy. And RoboPuddy, RoboCop used to go around the world, saving the world. RoboPuddy went around the world buying up shit. Yes. And that's when I went to Bulgaria on a trip. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about that one. Well, that, I mean, it was, I went to two places. I went to Bulgaria. I also went to a place called North Shields in Newcastle, a really pretty rough neck of the woods, right? And there were patties all over the place. In North Shields. Buying, buying English houses, like buying rows of council houses, and of course all financed by AIB or whatever. But I do remember once realizing the whole thing was over the RoboPuddy that I got into a taxi in Dublin, and a taxi driver looks at me and he's sitting there and the dubs GAA Jersey. The AIG is stretched over his neck. He looked like a large blue condom. Yeah. He was all just like stretched over him and he says, "Oh, sweet Jesus. It's only our blade and self." I said, "Yeah. Hi. How are you?" And he said, "Where are you coming back from?" I said, "London." And then he said to me, "I'm out. I'm coming back from Kusa. I've seen myself last night." And I said, "Did you? That's great." And he said, "After buying five gaffes of plants." Right, so really interesting is that golf course come in 2029. He actually referred them as the creme de mont of developments, which was just such a good thing. But then the greatest line, he says, "Looks at me because lovely people, them Greeks." And that's the moment I knew it was all over. And he was RoboPuddy and he's in the book, right? And again, it was this idea of Irish people going around the world buying stuff. Yeah, there was so much of that. And then I explained where the credit was coming from, the credit was coming from Germany. And if you could understand that, because a lot of Irish people were thinking, like, "Where is all this money coming from?" And I was explaining to them, the Irish banks had run out of money and they were now borrowing money from Germans, and it was German money being recycled through Irish banks that was buying stuff in Kusarasi for Dublin taxi drivers. And that's what I said, I kind of left it there and said, "Look, there's usually five or six stages of these booms, you just take it as being." But the class thing interests me more, because what I really saw was the old middle class threw up all sorts of affectations and barriers to the new middle class. And that was the second part of the book, was the sort of change in the way in which people behaved in the society. And saw themselves. And that's where the term 'the haiko' came from. That came really from David Brooks's 'Bobos in Paradise'. So David Brooks wrote a very good book, I think, about 2001, called 'Bobos in Paradise'. And what was about was a subsection of the American middle class called the Bohemian bourgeois. So these are people who were bourgeois, but wanted to live like Bohemians. And I thought this was a really clever idea, and I could see it all over, it's kind of like the hipsters. There were hipsters before hipsters, I could see this happening in Ireland. And what struck me is that because we never had a bourgeois, our big fight in Ireland was between Irish people who felt they were cosmopolitan, who wanted to live in the foreign world, who wanted foreign influences. And who were lined up until the early 2000s, dramatically against what I saw, Irish people who wanted hibernian influences. So the Irish language, the Catholic Church to a degree, nationalism, Ireland first, all that sort of stuff. That was always there. And when we were children, John, the conflict in Ireland was always between people who wanted the cosmopolitan world, we wanted influences from America, from England, France, the New, and those who wanted the hibernian world, the old, the stable, the devil era. But then what intrigued me was we were beginning to see a fusion of these two together, like the Bohemian bourgeois, the hibernians and the cosmopolitans were now kind of, they had a truce together, and they were becoming the sort of what I would call the taste class, and they looked down their nose at the debtlanders. And as a result of that, there was a whole second part of the book written about the habits of this hope bourgeoisie, who I called Haikos, which is half hibernian, half cosmopolitan. Yeah. And it's that kind of you looking at the kind of class system in Ireland, which is very unique and very different to a class system, say in the UK or anywhere else. You're right. It's very different. Ireland is much more subtle, but I actually think it is as delineated. Really? Yeah. I do. I think the English class system is more honest. I think, you know, a posh Brit is a posh Brit, you know, public educated, and they're obsessed by what class you are, your middle class, whatever. We are more subtle. We're more likely to try to convince ourselves that we're all broadly the same class, that the aristocracy was got rid of, let's say, in 1921, the sort of, let's say the very British aristocracy disappeared. We were all poor together. I don't believe that for one single bit. Really? I think that there are enormous class, you know, you know, tales and poker. Yeah. You know, I felt like I had a tale and poker sense where I think the class tells in Ireland are unbelievably succinct, I think they're accurate, I think they are alarming. I think they're everywhere. Yeah. And I think in that very urge to compress the class system, we're creating a new nation of Irish people, and we're all going to be independent together, that very compression of the class system leaked into areas where class screams education, what people eat, how they eat, where they travel to, what types of, you know, there was a, I remember talking about the way that people say, oh, I went on holidays to Kazakhstan. Oh, really? You went to Kazakhstan. I went to New York myself, and straight away, what the person said, I'm going to Kazakhstan-y Atlas Mountains, working in tune with nomadic people type of person, whereas you're just a pleb who go to New York, right? Yeah. The money, the money, it was because people had money. When everybody has money, the class system recalibrates to send signals of how do you spend that money? Yeah. On what do you spend that money? So the second half of the book, I think, was the more contentious part because it sort of needled, possibly, the people who might have been reading the book, and it was a little bit of a pistachio. It didn't make you very popular. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. You came in for a lot of shtick, didn't you? Yeah. Well, I suppose you have to. I mean, the whole point of being a public commentator is that if you don't take shtick, you're not doing your job properly. So 20 years on from publishing the book, what do you think the lessons are then for Ireland and for Irish society? But before you answer that, let's go and do a bit of this. So 20 years on, Mac, from publishing the Pope's children, sold 140,000 copies in Ireland alone. That population are now in their 40s. So are there lessons from this generation and from the book? I don't know if the lessons are huge. I mean, I think maybe the reason it did well was that something like this had never been done before. Yeah. Yeah. In Ireland. Yeah. I think the reason it was probably never done before in Ireland was because, as you said at the end there, the first part, I got a lot of shtick. You know, you create a lot of enemies to this. Yeah. We gave you loads of wedgies. My dad did say to me, I remember because I was getting a lot of shtick and I got a bit upset and I came home and I was sitting in the kitchen and Dad just looked at me and he said, look, so say, so you got enemies. He said, show me a man with no enemies and I'll show you a man with no backbone. And it was a really, really wise thing to say, you know, you have enemies because you stand for something. Yeah. Because you actually get up and say, you know what? I think this is the way the world is. So I think what it probably did is a precipitated, a couple of copycats sort of writing that people thought, okay, you can write this way. You can take sociological trends, you can take musical trends, you can take pop culture, you can take real hard economic data, you can be playful, you can be a bit silly, you can be a bit bitchy, you know, and you can paint a picture of a society like a day in a life, like a snapshot, you know, and I think so that's the lesson was that, you know, there was a way of writing. I had never thought- That's a lesson for you. But for commentators, for writers, for journalists that, you know, I'd never thought that you could actually write like this and would sell, that you could be very playful and you could be extremely engaged with your subject and engaging, hopefully. You know, so for example, I went around with a bouncy castle fella, a real fella, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I love the notions of bouncy castles and the reason I love the notions of bouncy castles, this is what you'll absolutely love, is that both our kids are born in May and Sean would be very meticulous and Sean would have always been somebody who would say, okay, we're going to have a party in the back garden beside the deck and we're going to get a bouncy castle, right? And have a barbecue for the adults. Oh, no, yeah, exactly, barbecue for the adults, drinking, rolling, rock, like all these things that really intrigue me. These are the signs, right? And all these people, right? But Sean would start going mad about three weeks or four weeks before the birthday of Lucy and Cal. And I'd say, "Why?" And she'd say, "There are no bouncy castles." I'd say, "How do you mean there's no bouncy castles?" So Sean is from the community in the north that don't have communions. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she didn't realize that the first three weeks of May, when our two children were born, is Communion season. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way in which... It could be bigger than Christmas. The way in which good, low-abiding Catholics celebrate Communions is with a fuck-off bouncy castle. Right? The bigger, the better. Feel the kids full of sugar, sugar on the bouncy castle, and then see what happens. And then see what happens. And then the parents all get language, right? But so Sean was sitting there thinking, "What's the story? There's a run of bouncy castles?" I said, "No, Sean, I'm going to introduce you to living in the Republic. The biggest month is May, and that's communion." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So because of that, I decided, okay, well, to get a sense of who's buying the bouncy castles, you have to go with the bouncy castle man. So I went around for three weekends of May to all the bouncy castles all around West Dublin and North Dublin, and actually North Cork, you went around as well, and it was just a hoot. So that's sort of way of looking at it. I think the only lesson is that what comes out of the suburbs is the nation. And that's the same today as it was then. So if you want to understand what's happening in Ireland, go to the suburbs. Travel around. Open your eyes. Travel around for about a year with a notebook, just taking notes and doing that sort of on the ground sociological reason. I call it pop sociology. Yeah, yeah. Kind of, you know, making up your sociology. And I think that's the important thing because, but the last thing, John, is that generations are affected differently, and that I think is the lesson. So an Irish person at 60, and an Irish person at 40, and an Irish person at 20 have totally different life experiences. So for example, a great example of that is the 2008 crash. So we experienced it as adults. Our friends experienced it as adults who lost their jobs. Their kids, our kids experienced it as children whose dads and mums lost their jobs. Our parents experienced something quite remote that happened to other people, right? But they had the trauma of looking at their kids in trouble. This is one event. Yeah. Right? This is one snapshot. Okay. I always think the greatest snapshot in the world is Saipan. Where were you when Roy walked out of the football team, right? Different generations are differently affected. Yeah. And so you take it right now. The pandemic, our generation has not been as badly affected by the pandemic as our children. Absolutely. And we don't know just yet how that will play out. We're not sure just yet. We know that there's not just mental health issues. There's lots of issues about grit. By grit, I mean, this younger generation that lives through the pandemic's ability to actually go through hard times seems to have been changed dramatically. So what the Pope's children, the lesson from that is you can take a moment in time. Like the day the Pope arrived. You can see what official Ireland wanted. They wanted this to be the peak of a phase of Catholicism and we would kick on and become a fundamentalist Catholic Republic. Yeah. Right? That's what they wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the event, it was the beginning of the end. People just said, "No, I forget. I don't want that anymore." Right? Yeah. And it went, as my mother would say, like snow off a ditch. It was gone, right? Yeah. But so you take that one event and you look through the prism of various different generations. And that, I suppose, is the lesson that when we're talking about economic history, what we're talking about economic history for one generation, what I like to do is look at for three generations. So the pandemic, how has that really affected people? Yeah. House prices now. How is that affecting people, immigration, migration to Australia? How is that affecting the generation? The generation who are there are liking it. Their parents are on Zoom all the time, missing them. Their younger brothers and sisters are influenced by that. Everybody comes to the table with different experiences and I suppose if that was the lesson, if there was a serious lesson in the Pope's children, it was to look at generational experience rather than general experience because there is no general experience. Let me ask you one final thing very quickly. So you followed the Pope's children with a number of other books, followed the money and the good generation. The generation game and the good generation and the Renaissance nation was very much like that. Yeah, absolutely. But your last book, Money, would you have been able to write money without having written the Pope's children? That's a really good question. No way. No way. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like doing keepie-upies. Yeah. Right? You become better at it. Captain Connelly. She becomes better at it. She's going to be the Maradona Presidents, right? No, it's like writing something. You become better at it. You become less flabby with the words. You know how to write, instruct the paragraphs. You become more ambitious and I just thought on money that it was time to write a book outside of Ireland. Yes. It's time to look. Yeah. And also I've probably been thinking about money for a long, long time and it just came to me over a period of years. But you're absolutely right. It's like anything. It's like playing an instrument. You get better the more you use it. Your muscle memory, your mental muscle memory, it just becomes better and becomes, you hope more creative. Yeah. That might not necessarily be the case. But it was also a resource that you could dip into, you know, you've done so much reading and research. Yeah. I know. I believe it here, you know. It's better than a real job.