"We are boozing, eating, shopping, shagging and taking more drugs than almost any other nation, " he said. "We have more money in our pockets than almost anybody else in Europe. This year alone, we will spend 75bn on consumption which equates to about 20,000 for every man, woman and child."

Oh Lordy. What have I been missing out on? Who is this pope and where are his children? I'll have whatever they're on. Show me the way to their country and let's get this party started.

As the loneliness settled over me like a shroud, another feeling came to the surface . . . confusion. The title of the TV series is In Search Of The Pope's Children. Anybody who read McWilliams' book, The Pope's Children, would be under the illusion that he had found and branded these people.

The book is littered with them.

Decklanders, Kells Angels, Breakfast Roll Man, HiCos, (Hibernian Cosmopolitans). Ok, most of them are 10 to 20 years older than those born around 1980, soon after the pope visited, but they are nevertheless presumed to be real people.

So, where were they when the time came to flesh them out? These exemplars of the zeitgeist do exist, don't they?

All we got on Monday were actors. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing the beauties that turn up on page 70 of the book.

Dave relates in some detail an incident on a bus in Cork, where he spotted a crowd of tracksuited young fellas, dripping jewellery and cliches.

These lads were abusing Polish construction workers. Then, as a confrontation loomed, the two groups began discussing the price of property in Poland and sure, isn't property the great leveller. I can't wait to see these boys made flesh.

They are real, aren't they?

At least there was the man who delivers The Star newspaper. Dave points out thatThe Star is the paper most popular with the Pope's Children, so he went out early one morning on a delivery run, to see where these kids live.

It's difficult to know what he learned from the jaunt. The Star is stocked by every newsagent from Cahirciveen to Carandonagh. Are the Pope's Children a lost tribe, scattered to the four corners of the state?

Sex and The Late Late Show WHATEVER about this exciting country he oversees, I couldn't for the life of me recognise the different country that is the past. Dave revealed that his elder sister's friend lost her virginity at the pope's youth mass in Galway in 1979. Then he threw in something about the road he lived on being scandalised at this carry-on.

Sex mightn't have arrived in Ireland until The Late Late Show, but the notion that teenagers in the 1970s were anything but envious of somebody who'd popped their cherry is bringing revisionism to new heights of silliness. Maybe the teen HiCos of south county Dublin had hang-ups about these things. Maybe if you're going to create a brave new world, then emphasis demands that the one that went before it is presented as a darker shade of dreary.

The Pope's Children, on the page or screen, isn't bad entertainment. It's slick, sexy, gimmicky, and, here and there, does deliver a few observations about the better-off elements of society. Elsewhere, it veers into fiction, using bare statistics to extrapolate onto the prairies of a fertile imagination.

McWilliams, more than the elusive Decklander or HiCo, is a product of the new order. He has branded himself a guru of pop economics, a touchstone for the zeitgeist. He has a sharp intellect and an apparently amiable personality. He has a common touch. After bringing the tablets down from the mountain, he mingles with the lesser mortals.

If he required rebranding, he could pitch himself as Bertie Bright.

Appropriately for New Ireland, he operates with smoke and mirrors.

On the McWilliams website, a question is displayed prominently.

"Is David wrong about an Irish property crash?" According to the results, voters believe by three to one that he isn't wrong. He has been predicting this crash for at least seven years. He may well be right yet. Sometime.

His pitch for The Pope's Children phenomenon is that he is an antidote to the "commentariat", those who write newspaper columns, or propound over the airways. He himself pens two weekly columns and is a regular on radio and TV. His columns are far from radical, displaying a social conscience one week, heralding the free market the next. How is he separate from the commentariat? Smoke and mirrors.

In siring the pope's brood, McWilliams might have added a subtitle: 'The view from South County Dublin'. For if the racy world he describes exists to any extent, then it is largely known only to the upper echelons of the middle class.

Anybody claiming to present the zeitgeist would have to look beyond the winners in the new order to the large swathe who struggle. They may not be sexy, or feed at the trough of plenty, but they are part of what Ireland is today.

By accident rather than design, what The Pope's Children really highlights is the slickocracy (hey, catchy name or what? ). This tribe rules over much in business, politics and the media today, and subscribes to the theory that slick packaging and presentation will overpower substance anytime.

All hail the slickocracy LAST WEEK, we had the perfect example of the slickocracy at work.

Janette Byrne has written a harrowing account of her experience at the hands of the Irish hospital service. It should be regarded as compulsory reading for anybody interested in the hierarchy of values in New Ireland.

She writes of the filth in the Mater Hospital, the Third World conditions hidden away in a country where, according to Dave, 75bn will be spent on consumption this year. And in response, the hospital, overseen by the Sisters Of Mercy, got its expensive PR firm on the job to discredit Byrne.

Then they deployed one of the most expensive legal firms to threaten her with court action and bankruptcy. They had a few minor issues with her claims, but rather than deal with those in a temperate manner, they wheeled out the slick pros to steamroll her into submission.

Only after a thorough airing on Joe Duffy's show . . . McWilliams portrays Duffy as Dante, overseeing the hell of the unfortunate . . . did the hospital back down.

So it goes with Il Papa and his brood. Any reference to the real Ireland would take the gloss off the presentation. Ignore a two-tiered health service where half the population are uninsured. Don't mention that around one in five people in the state are in danger of falling into poverty.

Rat infested schools? Where? Not here, surely not here, where consumption spending equates to 20 grand a year for every man, woman and child? Amidst all the fluff peddled in The Pope's Children, the statement that the gap between rich and poor has narrowed is the most farfetched.

Things are better than they were.

Nobody has to emigrate. Absolute poverty is not as bad as it was. But who would swap places with the actual Pope's Children, those under 26, whom Dave says will drive on the economy? They might have more money than ever before, but they also carry pressures that the rest of us were never burdened with.

The hedonism that Dave celebrates is fine and dandy, as long as Il Papa's brood can leave it behind with their 20s. The professionals suggest that problems are being stored up for the future.

Three out of four people today know somebody who committed suicide, and the bulk of those are from that young age group. That's not sexy, or slick. That's life for the Pope's Children. Zeitgeist, how are you?

DIARMUID DOYLE, PAGE 21