GIVE David McWilliams credit for one thing: he is probably the only public intellectual in the world who thinks his country should be more like Israel. Even reliable old American Zionists like Norman Podhoretz of Commentary and Martin Peretz of The New Republic would choose Boston over Beersheba any day of the week . . . and these are the crazy guys who want to bomb Tehran tomorrow.

The big new idea in The Generation Game, McWilliams's catchphrase-heavy indictment of Celtic Tiger profligacy, is that Ireland needs to reach out to its far-flung diaspora to hold off economic stagnation. The Irish, you see, are "Jews with booze": an international, hardworking, business-friendly and, er, slightly drunk race with outposts in key power centres throughout the world. An ingathering of these exiles would not only strengthen Irish trade relations across borders, but would reinvigorate Dublin with the dynamism of New York and London.

So what's giving McWilliams Hebrew envy? Well, Israel sustains itself with a clever blend of global tribalism and national destiny. We've almost got the tribal part down . . . Roy Keane's problems with Mick McCarthy notwithstanding . . . but national destiny? Even Fianna Fail doesn't believe in that stuff.

It helps, of course, to have the Bible on your side. It's no coincidence, then, that McWilliams spends the better (or is that bitter? ) part of The Generation Game sermonising on the moral failures of boomtime Ireland. This is a big old idea . . . after a summer of market chaos it's now widespread, too . . . and the litany is familiar.

We've borrowed, built and bought too much, invested too little and planned too badly. The bill is coming due and we're going to come up short. Repent, ye sinners!

OK, he's almost certainly right and his timing is impeccable.

Sure, McWilliams didn't plan to launch his book the same week we saw the first bank run in decades, but he's got the zeitgeist by the scruff of the neck.

Yet in his exhaustive and relentless characterisation of the state we're in, he doesn't tell us a whole lot we didn't know . . . or sense . . . already. What sets The Generation Game apart from the usual aren't-we-bad diatribes is McWilliams's well-known love of alliterative labels and his surprising aversion to the Irish nouveaux riches. So we've got an unflattering portrayal of the dumb luck Jagger Generation and the crafty Bono Boomers ganging up against the struggling Jugglers in an intergenerational struggle for the wealth and soul of the nation (which is going to hell, by the way). Who will lead us to the promised land?

Certainly none of the sort he catalogues in a sweep through Dublin Airport . . . a latter-day Sodom of conspicuous consumption . . . where cash-rich, taste-poor travellers toss away their euros on fancy cosmetics and lousy coffee served by Slavs who, ominously, know something about thrift and hard work.

It goes on and on like that, one condemnation after another, from Botox-soaked south Dubliners to the power-grabbing family farmers of the West, McWilliams leaves no cliche unturned or uninvented. The Generation Game shows us a rich nation drowning in cheap trivia.

But just over Jordan is a shining city on a hill . . .