Personally I find McWilliams’ analysis trite and shallow. He rarely provided anything by way of a useful tool for understanding our society, obsessed as he is with rendering easily digested populism sweetened with dollops of cliche.

OK, I just think that his method is so explicit that it almost becomes a parody of the whole practice of segmentation and treating human beings as units of mere consumption and prodction. Maybe I have too much faith in people, but I feel it would take a complete fucking knobhead to go to work having convinced himself that he’s an uggler-buggler or whatever.

The thing about horoscopes is that they demonstrate a desire for a certain degree of order, of knowing that things can be foretold and that everything is part of the one system. I think this gets replicated somewhat in the popular pastime of filling out questionnaires to determine how much of a go-getter/sex bomb/property tycoon/emotional genius you really are. That is, you have this external omniscient authority -based on capitalist interest- and you need to see how much you fit in with its plans.

Maybe this is also part of McWilliams’s present appeal, but I don’t think that economic categories such as these can be flogged indefinitely. At some point it will dawn on a lot of people that, actually, it stinks. That’s what I hope anyway.

We have all heard about these people who have been able to downgrade and make some money out of the mortgage boom, but we have no figures as to how many, or how much they’ve made. We have, instead, “anecdotal” evidence that they exist in their tens of thousands - enough, it seems, to get the banks off the hook for fuelling the mortgage boom. These tens of thousands are in the same phantom place as the holiday homes that were put out by all and sundry as the black hole in Irish construction until the Census showed that to be a lot of nonsense.

The periphery has not set the agenda. householders have not set the agenda. The aforementioned vested interests Ireland have. and have made billions in the process.

You cannot say that only mortgage companies, banks, property speculators and developers have benefitted from the housing boom. They are the ones who benefitted the most, certainly, but there is a large group of houseowners who have also benefitted substantially in more modest ways. These people are quite unconcerned that the property developers and banks make big bucks provided they get a piece of the action as well. They don’t set the rules, but once the rules work in their favour they are quite happy to play along.

These are the people who benefitted personally from rising house prices and they are usually above a certain age so McWilliam’s generation analysis has value. These people have demonstrably benefitted and don’t fit into your “80pc manipulated masses Vs property tycoons/banks” scenario.

And you’re spot on about the labelling thing. As far back as 1986, Val Burris wrote an article about media and social commentators’ obsession with defining “the New Middle Class”:

“The reasons for this preoccupation with the new middle class are not hard to identify. As salaried professionals, most social theorists are themselves members of the new middle class. Their concern with this group is thus motivated by an interest in self-understanding, if not by an inflated sense of their own importance.”

The “inflated sense of their own importance” ties into the Ego thing alright, and serves to shield the power players from a more robust analysis.

As an analysis of the power structures in Irish society, it is useless. furthermore, it is counter-productive, as it gives the impression that these consumer groupings reflect societal power structures. I mean, that’s the whole idea behind his Generation Game, and “bono boomers.” He asks people to spot themselves among these consumer groups, and by doing so shines a light away from the massive corruption and power-plays at the heart of Irish society. David Mcwilliams is to societal analysis what horoscopes are to the future.

The thrust of this post has to do with the angle Mcwilliams is coming from, and how those PR and marketing consumer groupings are what most people think of when they think of societal analysis. I’m basing this on some of the comments my working-class posts have received over the past six months - and it was those comments which led me down the path of PR and marketing, and how those ideas have obscured the ropes that bind.