THEY had a grand old chortle about the garlic. The political and media classes will be chortling about Brian Lenihan chewing garlic in David McWilliams's house for a long time to come, perhaps for all eternity.

But with their chortling, naturally they missed the interesting part of it, the great leap forward in our culture that is signified by the garlic.

They forgot that in Brian Lenihan's father's time, no self-respecting minister making a midnight call in such circumstances, would even think of arriving without a bottle of whiskey in his hand.

Just as a matter of basic courtesy. Almost a form of protocol.

And in certain circumstances -- in most circumstances, if truth be told -- the host would immediately fetch a couple of glasses, and the two men would sit there in the kitchen talking about matters of apocalyptic importance while they drank the whiskey.

Indeed, they would not leave that room until the whiskey was all gone. And if the state of emergency which they were debating was particularly grave, the minister in all likelihood would reach into his briefcase and produce another bottle of whiskey which he kept there for . . . well, for emergencies.

And they would proceed to drink that too, clinking their glasses as the dawn broke over the beleaguered city.

And they would hardly consider the booze worth mentioning, in the overall context of the situation which was unfolding. If men of that generation ever felt the need to unburden themselves of such intimacies to the press, they might make a passing reference to the minister "cradling a glass of malt".

Just to stay alert, you know.

Eating raw garlic was never their style. Indeed, the only conceivable circumstances in which those men might be found eating garlic would also be related to whiskey in a roundabout way -- maybe someone told them that if you chew enough of that stuff, it kills the smell of the whiskey, or disguises it, or some such notion that Haughey might have picked up in France .

They would have baulked at the notion that the next generation of Fianna Fail leaders, at a time of terrible crisis, would be swallowing such things just for the good of their health.

But, given what we know now, we should hereby acknowledge its significance and give it a guarded welcome.

Commentators also had a different code of practice back then, which generally restrained them from revealing anything of genuine interest to the public.

In fact, even if a minister had arrived at their door at midnight roaring belligerently and reeking of whiskey and demanding that they join him in an all-night drinking session -- and that's an order -- they would not have considered it newsworthy.

They would never have been so irresponsible. And anyway, the minister's belligerent alcoholism would be a private matter.

But I guess they were more contented with their lot, these old-timers.

As long as they knew things that other people didn't know, they were happy.

For a David McWilliams, that would never be enough. Nor is he exactly alone among today's celebrity economists in wanting to come off the sidelines, and be a player.

Especially at this time, when, as George Lee has pointed out, there is perhaps another role out there, perhaps an even more important role than that of mere commentator.

Being the top banana matters to these guys, and they will never miss an opportunity to remind us how right they were -- though McWilliams has a superb technique here, briefly reminding us that he was right and then moving on briskly because "this is not about who was right and who was wrong".

But McWilliams is still apparently outside the tent, while men of obviously lesser ability are inside it. And, for this alone, their meagre efforts in the national interest should be unreservedly trashed.

Perhaps justifiably, McWilliams seems to be developing an exaggerated sense of his own exclusion, with a recent article of his headlined 'Rich get richer as rest of us pay for their mistakes'.

Readers would no doubt have been charmed to discover that Macker now sees himself as one of "the rest of us". And as if to reinforce his sense of solidarity with the faceless hordes, in another piece he told of a journey which he took from Cork to Galway on what can only be described as a bus. Of course, he took the opportunity to marvel at the absence of a train from Cork to Galway and to report on the anger of young people on the bus, with whom he spoke.

But there must have been others on that bus who were looking at him and wondering if this was the same Macker whom they saw speaking to camera in Davos, in Switzerland, with the snowflakes falling gently on him and on the world's richest people, gathered in the exclusive Swiss resort to think great thoughts -- certainly the folks you encounter at a Davos summit are not the sort who can generally be found on the City Link from Cork to Galway, chatting away.

But Macker is not one of them. He is one of us.

He may also be over-compensating after his recent TV series, Addicted to Money, which was so impressive in many ways, but which undeniably had its moments of big-swinging-mickey excess. It would not be untypical to find Macker starting a sentence in Dublin, Ireland, and finishing it, say, on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Yet it was evident that Macker had heeded my advice and cut back on all the Fr Trendy-type lines which dominated his earlier work. Clearly the man himself is open to new thinking, and will revise his own performance accordingly.

So, yet again, I think I called that one right. But of course, this is not about who was right and who was wrong.

Sunday Independent