When I was a teenager, a friend’s south Dublin mother, in a one-stop effort to rank this unfamiliar young lad, on hearing my name asked: “Is that McWilliams the legal family?” When I replied in the negative, you could sense her disappointment as my position plummeted on the class score board in her head. Class, rank and position were never far from the surface of the suitability assessment of some mothers back in the 1980s. For me it was hilarious – but for them it was real.

From its independence up to the 1970s, Ireland experienced very little social mobility as the economy floundered. Since the 1980s, that has changed and Ireland has in general experienced rapid social mobility. Those kids born around the time John Paul visited in 1979 were the first generation to experience this social uplift on a generalised basis. Research from the ESRI notes a significant increase in absolute social mobility, with many individuals, regardless of their social origins, moving towards higher social classes most probably due to the expanding number of professional and managerial positions in the economy.

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This social surge could be felt in every corner of the country. In a sense, you could call this “bourgeois-isation” of much of the population the “Irish Dream”. The Americans had their American Dream in the 1950s and 1960s, where children were likely to end up better off than their parents. These are the Boomers, much maligned by the younger and poorer Millennials and Generation X, largely because incomes are stagnating across America.

For example, 90........

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