David McWilliams: the Interview

Whatever else you say about David McWilliams, the man sure does possess a winningly self-deprecatory streak. Posing for photos with HP snapper Liam Sweeney during our recent meeting in the Burlington Hotel, the genial Agenda presenter, Sunday Business Post columnist and all-round purveyor of awesomely erudite economic analysis laughingly frets to your correspondent that he’s “not rock ‘n’ roll enough to be interviewed by hotpress”. During a brief telephone exchange the day after our interview, he expresses the hope that sifting through a tape of “all that bollocks” wasn’t too harrowing an experience.

In truth, McWilliams’ worries were spectacularly ill-founded. I must confess that before we met, I had wondered if the hint of preppy smugness detectable in his TV performances was a true reflection of his personality, or simply an unfortunate by-product of the haughty accent and the Famous Five-style flop of schoolboy hair.
In the end, any faint prejudices I had harboured proved to be misguided. Humourous, friendly and a gifted raconteur (a skill helped by an arsenal of fascinating stories accumulated during 15 years of adventures in the upper echelons of finance, politics and media), McWilliams is excellent company. And as an interviewee, he belongs to that rarefied strata of subjects commonly referred to in media circles as a journalist’s dream.
His breadth of intellectual reference is staggering; one minute you’re discussing the merits of the latest Blur album or Klaus Kinski’s performance in Fitzcarraldo, the next he’s speculating about John Magnier’s elaborate ruse to shaft Alex Ferguson from Manchester United, riffing effortlessly (and often highly entertainingly) on the most esoteric economic theory, and recalling the time that the SWP’s Richard Boyd Barrett (whom he palled around with in Dun Laoghaire during his formative years) nicked one of his Crass albums.
McWilliams also occupies a unique position in the Irish cultural landscape. A maverick, doggedly individualist broadcaster/journalist who expresses disdain for the cult of personality that has seized Irish media in recent years (an axis of writers he witheringly describes as the “commentariat”), he is perhaps representative of a younger generation of Irish people who have a great deal of difficulty accepting the empty dogma of right or left.

PAUL NOLAN: Let’s start with a little background. Where did you grow up and where did you go to school?
DAVID McWILLIAMS: I grew up in Monkstown and then in Dalkey, but I’m a Dun Laoghaire person really. It was an interesting place to grow up, the social mix was quite diverse. School-wise, I ended up in Blackrock College. I wouldn’t say that I was bookish kid exactly; I wouldn’t have been a swot in school. But I had a fairly good idea that it was kind of smart to do your Leaving Cert and get a half-way decent result!
When did you first start taking a serious interest in economics?
In college, actually. I don’t know why, because I’d had no real interest in it beforehand. I ‘d been more interested in History and English literature when I’d been in school. I did economics for about a year as part of a course in Trinity, and gradually sort of found myself thinking, ‘Oh, this is actually very interesting’, and then subsequently got quite seriously into it, and really started to enjoy it. It really fascinated me, and it still does - I’m a bit of nerd in that regard.
In your journalism, you frequently use the movements of tectonic plates as a metaphor for dramatic economic change – both systems, of course, are governed by the laws of chaos theory. You seem absolutely fascinated with the way economics exerts such a profound influence on the culture as a whole - often without us even being aware of it.
You’re absolutely spot-on; you’ve hit on something that I’ve thought about quite a bit. Namely, the disproportionate influence that economics has on people’s lives, and disproportionate lack of interest that people have in understanding it. So you get a situation where you have something that I would think it is reasonably essential to understand, and yet it’s not elevated in schools. And even when it is elevated in schools and taught in universities, frequently what you get is very bad mathematics and very remote, esoteric theory - which takes away the fun of the subject. I mean, I think economics explains an enormous amount of day-to-day life, day-to-day politics and also sociology.
Perhaps part of the problem is that lecturers and journalists usually don’t give a concrete real-life example that people will be able to grasp. You wrote a great article recently - which also happened to be a perfect example of chaos theory - wherein you observed that even something as seemingly inconsequential as the begging patterns of homeless people can have the most extraordinary ramifications.
Okay, I should just preface this by saying that I’m not an evangelist for the life-enhancing wonders of economic theory! But yeah, that’s the sort of example that has also struck me as being quite illuminating. Everyone in Ireland queues to use ATM machines, and junkies and homeless people realise that this is a good neck of the woods to go. That’s not dissimilar to how companies operate, and it’s not dissimilar to how people generally operate. Maybe I just look at the world that way as a result of my training, but I do think that it would be of great consequence if economics could be taken out of academia and made simple and logical.
I think part of the problem is that mathematicians have no where else to go except into economics, and they’ve hi-jacked it with bad mathematics, econometrics and very dry scientific analysis. As a profession, they’ve become almost like the medieval church, and this scares me greatly. If you look at discussions at the moment about globalisation, anti-globalisation, politics etc., economics has narrowed the latitude of the debate to dream, and what I’m referring to there is the tyranny of numbers. If I put an argument to you, Paul, and I come up with a definitive numerical solution, all your good ideas and aspirations are rendered null and void. So we’re a bit like the medieval priests speaking Latin; what we’re saying to the lay person is, ‘You don’t understand this, it’s really hard stuff’. That’s something that bothers me quite a bit.
What was your career progression in between leaving college and starting work on Agenda?
I did a masters in Belgium and I loved it there; it’s a really under-rated country. Great bars and cafés, very adult licensing laws, gorgeous cities - a really wonderful place to spend time in. Then in 1990 I applied to work in the Central Bank in Dublin, which is the sort of holiest of holiest in terms of Irish economics. And I got the job, which was kind of miraculous, and spent three years writing speeches for Bertie, actually. Bertie was the Minister for Finance and wouldn’t have been very well versed in the intricacies of exchange rates and so forth, so we used to prime him on appropriate governmental reaction to economic events.
That must have been a fascinating insight into how top-level government and economic institutions collude.
It was interesting to deal with the pomposity of that kind of milieu, where the most ludicrous situations can arise. I remember a couple of years later I met Kenneth Clarke, the former British chancellor, in a bar in Hong Kong of all places. He was really good fun, a hilarious fella. And as an example of how ludicrous things can get, he told me that on the day sterling dropped through the floor in the early nineties, himself, Michael Heseltine and Norman Lamont were sitting in the back room of Number 11 Downing Street, huddled around a transistor radio and trying to understand what was going on courtesy of BBC Radio 4’s economics correspondent. And all because they didn’t have access to the financial markets. The people who were supposed to be dictating sterling’s position were as in the dark as anyone else!
That strikes me as being a delicious irony in the Dr. Stranglove mould: the people who are supposed to be in positions of authority aren’t really in control.
The people who are supposed to be in control aren’t in control, and this is the beauty of all sorts of powerful institutions which flex their muscles publicly. You realise many of them are built on sand, and that’s something which my time in the Central Bank taught me. Once you have an understanding of the conventions of the system, you could have great fun with it if were you were particularly mischievous. I mean, I really did observe that at a certain point we could more or less have written anything, and it would have been read out. Fortunately I’m not that devious!
(Laughing) How could you possibly resist the temptation not to write something ridiculous?
Well it’s funny, ‘cos at the time I wrote a series of articles for Business & Finance under the pseudonym Jack Rosen. So I was writing speeches for Bertie on Wednesday and criticising him on a Friday in Business & Finance! That was the sort of mischievous side of me coming out, realising that this could actually be a bit of a laugh. But I mean, there’s a very serious side to it too. You understand how government works, how central banks work, how they operate the market system, how they deal with legislation, all that kind of stuff.
Ironically, it was a speech I made to defend the currency which actually got me out of the Central Bank. I was sent out to concoct an elaborate defensive strategy, because they thought, ‘This guy’s articulate, he knows what he’s talking about’. At the time Swiss and German investors owned £11billion of Irish government assets, and people were worried about devaluing, because if we devalued by 20% they stood to lose £3 billion - a lot of bread. So I went out and gave this speech about Ireland and the punt and what a great little country we had.
Afterwards, a very august and extremely wealthy looking individual approached me and said, “Mister McWilliams, you don’t know me, but if you can lie for your country with a straight face, you can lie for us.” He was the boss of the biggest bank in Europe, and four weeks later I was on the trading floor in London. Thus began my career as a stockbroker.
After working abroad as a stockbroker for a number of years, you moved back to Dublin in late ’99. How did you get involved with Agenda?
When the Late Late was still under Gaybo’s control, I made a speech about economics at a function in Dublin, and one of his researchers was there, I don’t know how. And I got a call from Uncle Gaybo himself! And I recognised the voice, even though Gay had never really been such a big deal in our house, because of course the Late Late used to be on a Saturday in the ‘70s, and that clashed with Match Of The Day! Anyway, I did the Late Late, and on the back of that I did an interview with a programme on TV3, which (TV3 Commissioning Editor) Jane Gogan saw. So she arranged a meeting and said, “We’re putting a current affairs show together, would you like to present it?”
I’d had no aspirations to ever do television, but it came along at the right time and I just thought, ‘This feels right, I should do it’. I mean, I had been doing a lot of work with CNN when I was London. My job with the bank entailed visiting a lot of countries that people were interested in, like Russia and Israel. So I’d had some experience of television, and having taken on board the counsel of Damien Kiberd, who’s still by biggest friend in the world of journalism - I mean, if I owe a lot to anyone, it’s Damien - I went and did Agenda. And, you know, I’m very proud of it. It’s a good programme.
It’s also a lot less in-your-face than most current affairs shows. Even something as basic as the theme music - on most other programmes of a similar ilk, the opening fanfare is incredibly bombastic and even vaguely threatening, whereas on Agenda it’s a snippet from ‘Teardrop’ by Massive Attack!
Yes, that dates from my Bristol years. (Laughs uproariously) Actually, now that I think about it, I probably was listening to Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and the Bristolian axis when the show was starting out.
And was the idea to have a more relaxed kind of format?
Yes, I suppose so. We like to give people the time to make their point and not concentrate so much on tripping them up. Also, you have to be aware that the news agenda is not necessarily the be-all and end-all. We try to deal with issues that are in the ether, which may not always be regarded as being especially newsworthy, but which people are talking about.
I mean, if you and I were to go for a drink now, we’d cover an incredibly diverse array of topics; football, music, women, politics etc etc. And I suppose what we try and do with the programme is reflect that to some degree. We have a brilliant team working on the show - Emer Hoare, the producer, is the unsung hero of the venture and profoundly influential in moulding the format. And, you know, perhaps because I wasn’t as well-versed in the conventions of current affairs programming, I was also less well-versed in the clichés. Maybe I was operating with a kind of blissful ignorance.
Agenda is clearly out of place on the TV3 schedules, and overall the station doesn’t appear to have offered a genuine alternative to what’s available on other domestic channels. Has it done enough to justify its license over the past few years?
There is an argument that for TV3 to go from 15% of the audience to 20%, it will have to introduce new programmes into its schedule, which are domestic and national in flavour, and expose important points about the society. I think that it probably will do that. But I suppose the thing is that my relationship with the TV company is very distant, and I don’t want to slag them off, because the truth is I don’t have meetings with them about their long-term programming strategy.
But I will say a couple of things about the situation. Do the TV3 schedules appeal to me all the time? No. Has it been the most successful launch of a TV station in Western Europe? Yes. And does RTE, with all its money, really do a great deal of what people would ideally like it to do?
I’ve always kind of suspected Hilary Clinton of being a media-literate, calculating careerist of the Mary Robinson-ilk. What’s your take on her?
That’s a big slap-down for Mary Robinson!
Obviously I admire some of things she’s done, but you know what I’m getting at.
Sure. Well, on a personal level I found Hilary Clinton to be very good company. She’s very giggly, very girly, very flirtatious off-camera. I mean, I’ve read a number of books about Hilary Clinton, which offer a variety of viewpoints, ranging from ‘She’s Lady Macbeth’ to ‘She’s Eleanor Roosevelt’, with Eva Peron somewhere in the middle. It’s like, take your pick, you know? But I found her to be a compelling speaker, and clearly a determined individual. I mean, she’s come through a lot, so obviously she has a bit of backbone. And if she ran for president, I think she would be a very serious candidate indeed.
At the other end of the political spectrum, you’ve also interviewed Henry Kissinger, whom many left-wing commentators accuse of being a war criminal.
Well, if you think Henry Kissinger is the prince of darkness, then interviewing him will confirm it, and I’ll tell you why: he’s got a retina problem, and he can’t stand bright light, so you actually have to interview him in the dark! But what do they say about Kissinger? They say he’s probably the most duplicitous, devious and self-serving operator in high-level US politics over the past thirty years or so. But if you decide to write people off, then you’ll never listen to their side of the argument, and I think that’s always paramount.
Kissinger is still around, he’s still influential, his books on diplomacy are extraordinary, he’s got an enormous grasp of US as well as European foreign policy. Did he order unspeakable acts in Chile, Cambodia and East Timor? Maybe he did. Do successive American secretaries of state do that? Probably yes. The generation that hate Kissinger were informed in 1970s; they’re the people for whom Vietnam was a reality. This again comes back to the inter-generational problem in western Europe: the generation that owns everything are sixties radicals. I’m certainly no apologist for Kissinger, but I suspect people in their twenties don’t possess the same hatred for the Nixon administration.
That’s probably true. For me, the most shocking aspect of Kissinger’s life is that he was considered a sex-symbol when he was younger. He dated Shirley Maclaine for Chrissakes!
That’s right! But what was Kissinger’s famous quote? “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac.” That might explain some of it!
Was the idea behind your breakfast show on NewsTalk to essentially transfer the Agenda format to radio?
That was my original idea, until I realised that it wasn’t going to work. What happened was that they came to me - honest to God, one of these days people are going to stop coming to me and I’ll be going to them looking for jobs - and my concept was to do something along the lines of Agenda, but my thinking probably wasn’t very good. Because of course radio is a one-sense medium - namely listening - and that demands a faster pace. But thankfully we have an incredibly talented team working on the show, people like Paul Tanney, Lydia Murphy and Michael McDermott, and they were able to steer me in the right direction.
I think we’re really starting to hit a groove on the show, and more broadly, I can see NewsTalk becoming a national station. There’s no doubt in my mind that there is a constituency not catered for by music radio, and that isn’t served by Morning Ireland. It’s probably people of my own generation, people for whom…the Arms Trial is quite remote. You know, it’s the kind of person that might have been in Whelan’s last night seeing a band, and he or she doesn’t like the diet of music - so-called music - you get on the national stations. In fact, it’s probably not all that dissimilar to the demographic that buys Hot Press.
Rumours continue to circulate that NewsTalk are hopeful of setting up Eamon Dunphy with a show at the station. Is it going to happen?
Look, Paul, it would probably make a great headline for Hot Press, but I honestly don’t have a clue what’s happening. I fell into the media and my attitude is that I could well fall out again at some point. I don’t hang out with any journalists, I never did and I probably never will. I’m the last person to know the gossip.
So let’s talk world politics. Does it matter who secures the Democratic nomination for the US presidential election? Or if the Democrats eventually win?
It does because George Bush is so extreme. George Bush is the most radical, revolutionary president the United States has ever had, and I think that in the current climate he is extraordinarily dangerous. The great thing about America is that it is a democracy and it functions, so he will be voted out at some stage. You see, the interesting thing about Bush is that he’s a revolutionary person, albeit in the right-wing sense.
I would hope that the Democrats can put forward somebody who can give him a hiding, but the thing about America is that the battleground is only 10% of the electorate, because about 40% on either side are already decided. So 10-20% is your swing vote, and that’s what the Democrats need. Now, I must admit, I’ve always found the Irish bias towards Democratic presidents hard to understand, because there isn’t really a great deal of difference between the two. As Noam Chomsky said, “The Republicans can be bought, the Democrats are just for rent.”
But I think the tone of America matters to the world, and I think the tone of being a benign, paternal super-power is so much more reassuring to people. It’s certainly more reassuring to me. Whereas the aggressiveness of the current administration is not particularly helpful. I mean, Richard Perle summed up their foreign policy in two words: “You’re next”. Now, quite clearly it works - as evidenced by the fact that Syria and Libya have come in from the cold - but I don’t think it’s very constructive.
You’ve written that having launched the war in Iraq, it was very much in our interests that America eventually won, which was probably the case. But the key question is: were they right to instigate the conflict in the first place?
No, I don’t think so. But I mean, it’s very, very hard to say in hindsight. Was the reason they gave for launching the war - ie. WMD - actually plausible? At the time it was, perhaps now the evidence is less convincing. But the important point to remember is this: ironically enough, it is in our interests that a benign America rules the world. To have a situation where a nation with around 5% of the world’s population controls 50% of the world’s resources is unsustainable. It is an incontrovertible fact that America’s empire will crumble, or at the very least dissipate.
The question for us is: how do they handle it? China is clearly going to outstrip them economically in the next ten years, militarily, I would say possibly in the next fifty years. So how will America choose to recede from its dominance: in an aggressive, adolescent way, or in an objective, paternalistic way? That’s the big question for me, and I would just hope they choose the latter option.
One thing that fascinates me about your work is that it is routinely seized upon by all sides of the political spectrum as justification for their own ideological beliefs. Do you think that’s because you’re part of a generation that is suspicious of the empty rhetoric of both right and left?
The first thing I have to say about this is that, for the most part, it’s just immensely flattering when someone writes a piece and they say, “I was listening to your man and I was convinced by him.” Not just because you might have put an argument across persuasively, but also because there’s a feeling of, “Somebody’s watching!” (Laughs) Look, the society here is changing, and the battlegrounds are between the generations. And maybe on some level I’ve managed to touch on that.
To go back to the very start of our discussion, the great thing is that economics gave me a fantastic framework within which to view the world. And many journalists don’t start with the framework, which I think is very important, because you build your arguments step by step. It’s like a building a house. Personally speaking, I’m the least ideologically driven person in the world. Now, this is only my own personal view, but an important lesson I learned was that ideology doesn’t ever fix anything. If you have a broken tap, ideology won’t fix it. I think sometimes what happens is that people make this slightly absurd leap in logic, and arrive at, “My tap is broken, I want a left-wing government.” Or, “The floor is banjaxed, we need a right wing administration.”
You were talking to me earlier about the Sunday Independent citing my contribution to the Dunphy Show in an article. The reality is that they were using me as a lightning rod to settle scores with Dunphy and Fintan O’Toole. I’d never met Fintan before in my life, I was sat there in the green room talking to him about childcare, with Jordan on the other side of me, which was a fairly surreal collection of people! Okay, I wasn’t convinced by the book he wrote recently, but sometimes I think he writes absolutely brilliant stuff. Look, the whole celebrity-isation of the culture gives me a pain in the hole. You see it infiltrating the Sunday papers now, and the more I see of it, the more I want to do my own thing.
Which you undoubtedly continue to do. With your work for NewsTalk, the Sunday Business Post and Agenda, you’ve followed a career path that’s slightly outside the mainstream. Could you ever imagine, say, moving to a drive-time current-affairs slot on a national radio station?
I don’t know, I quite like ploughing my own furrow. I like being independent and I also like the idea of competition. Although, I would argue that in the case of NewsTalk our show isn’t necessarily not mainstream, you know? But maybe it’s part of my instinct to go with things that are starting up, where perhaps there aren’t the footprints of other people already present. I just always try and go with the thing that interests me most at the time.
Do you have an overall ambition?
(Laughs) I’m happy just pottering along. I have a wife and two young kids whom I spend an inordinate amount of time with, and people don’t see that. I think when you have children you just become more ambitious for your family than anything else. Well, maybe not so much ambitious as…a lot of these factors we talked about have no consequence when you’re changing nappies in the middle of the night. (Laughs) I mean, many people have said, as you’ve said, ‘Wouldn’t you be happy going into the mainstream?’ And, you know, I think there’s a lot more to be done of the fringes of society just yet.

David McWilliams’ website is www.davidmcwilliams.ie
[photographs Liam Sweeney]