One of the most interesting things about McWilliams is that he himself personifies a growing trend in Irish media. He came to television by accident. His business interests and investments mean that he is not reliant on it for a living (although his fee for public speaking is 6,000). "I do it because I love it, " he says. "I love presenting, but I have quite low expectations of what it can deliver. I have an arm'slength relationship with it, and yet I love it. I suppose that's quite conflicted."

He was recruited to television by Jane Gogan, Eamon Dunphy's partner, who is currently head of drama at RTE, but was then setting up TV3. He was living in London at the time, working as a banker, when she called. "I was very bad at office politics, " he says. "I could never see any threats coming. I always thought everyone was lovely."

His current affairs programme Agenda was a big success. He became a columnist . . . he now writes for both the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post. He presented the breakfast programme on Newstalk when the station started, but was dropped to make way for Eamon Dunphy.

His Big Bite programme on RTE was one of the best things on the station, but it too was dropped after just two seasons.

McWilliams then wrote The Pope's Children.

All of this was, he says, unplanned. The setbacks did not unsettle him. Friends describe him as a "positive, glass-half-full sort of person." He grew up in Windsor Park in Dublin. When he asked his schoolteacher mother where the family stood within the class system, she told him that they were the type of people who didn't know anyone who had their obituary in the Irish Times. Although much has been made of his preppy appearance, it was a pretty ordinary suburban childhood.

According to him, his sisters . . . one a teacher, one a school secretary . . .

think his success is still "me talking nonsense.

They had it for years at the kitchen table."

Those who were with him at TCD . . . where he roomed with Jay Bourke, now owner of the CafeBarDeli chain, in a sort of Redhead Central in Botany Bay . . . say he was always enthusiastic, ebullient and curious about the world.

It was apparent pretty quickly that McWilliams was a television natural. "The most naturally talented person that I've ever worked with, " says his producer on TheBig Bite, Yvonne Nolan. "He's a risktaker and naturally curious."

Researchers are the infantry of any television project, and McWilliams's researchers are enthusiastic about him.

"The best presenter I ever worked with, " says Yvonne Kinsella, who also worked on The Big Bite. "You'd go into a briefing at 9 o'clock in the morning and be in stitches. He can talk to top business people and people in the street. I'm living for the moment I can work with him again. He'd often email you with jokes." In television, this type of statement is unusual; in fact it could be unique.

"People presume that he's going to be some sort of snotty person, but he is great fun. We had great fun shooting, " says Claire Ridge who worked on In Search Of The Pope's Children. In fact, McWilliams can cope with most things on television. "If news broke and you handed him a scrappy piece of paper and he had to wing it, he would, " says a member of the Big Bite team. "He was never a prima donna about doing it either."

The strong expectation amongst these colleagues now is that McWilliams will be snapped up by television companies in the UK, and move there. He already has a two-book deal with MacMillan, to produce a British version of The Pope's Children, due out next March, and then a sequel to it, to be delivered next October.

There is also an international book on globalisation; McWilliams learned Russian in 1990.

McWilliams has not exactly explained the new Ireland, but he has worked his way through the wilderness, bravely trying to name the animals that live there, examining the habitat and observing its weather. In response, the new Ireland seems grateful. One of the people who worked on the documentary series explained how members of the public had no objections to being described as Decklanders at all, although HiCos were, perhaps predictably, harder to find.

David McWilliams' great talent is for description. He called the recent Ryder Cup jamboree "a Bacchanallian orgy for bean counters". In telling us about Germany's continuing problems coping with its old communist territories, he spots the "Saxon accents, plum hair dye, and green eye shadow" which mark the waitresses in a city bar as coming from the old East Germany. He is laser accurate on the GAA Moms as they drive towards the Saturday practice game, and possible divorce once the kids are gone: "The GAA mum, with her trademark tied-back hair, stretches her face when she looks in the mirror . . . the way women in their 30s do."

And he is equally good at talking about the Indian women who borrowed money from the micro-bank started by Muhammed Yunus in Bangladesh.

His descriptions of economics are simple, even for those of us who thought that the BNP was a fascist party in the UK (in fact the letters can also stand for Banque Nationale de Paris, where McWilliams once worked). Whether the descriptions are accurate or not . . . and McWilliams famously predicted the collapse of the Irish property market for something like seven years . . . is hard to say. Economists are a bit like weather forecasters . . . what actually happens is never their fault.

However, McWilliams is now a lot bigger than economics . . . he even has a starring role with Ross O'Carroll Kelly, another old 'Rock boy. He looks set for a long career in the media if he wants one. "It's better than a real job, " he says.

C.V.

Born: St Michael's hospital, Dun Laoghaire, 12 August 1966. Two older sisters.

Mother: schoolteacher.

Father: middle manager of pharmaceutical patents "rm.

Education: Blackrock College, Trinity College Dublin, the big bad world of banking.

Family: Married to Sian, a solicitor. Daughter Lucy (6), son Cal (4).

In the news because: his documentary series, In Search Of The Pope's Children, starts on RTE1 tomorrow night