Is Mrs Brown’s Boys’ creator Brendan O’Carroll right when he says that younger generations should feck off with their claims that Britain’s  baby boomers are wrecking their world?

O’Carroll has been listening to the mounting complaints by millennials and Generation Z-ers recently and responded in resolute voice. 

Britain’s most successful drag artist believes that it is in fact the younger, “disposable” generation – and not his own – that are responsible for “ruining the planet”.

Does he have a point? And do his comments underline the belief the generation gap is becoming even wider than the comedy writer’s smile when depositing his earnings from stadium shows? “Our generation were doing it right,” he claims. “It’s the disposable generation who are ruining the planet.

Everything is disposable now, even furniture. We had a couch all our lives, they change their couch now like they change their wallpaper.”

The 64-year-old Dubliner hit back at the social media attacks made by millennials (born 1981-1996) on baby boomers (1946-1964) such as himself.

“We recycled bottles and washed out nappies,” he added. “We had the right idea back then.”

O’Carroll could also point out that millennials and Generation Z (1997- now) are the plastic bottle generation, the grouping that killed off the paper bag. He could argue this demographic may never have even heard of polio – but somehow lost the use of their legs, resulting in them being driven the mile and a half to school each day in their parents’ gas guzzler.

The comedy star could also underline our younger generation’s insistence on wearing man-made fibred clothes made in a North African sweat shop only up to the point they need their first wash. He could cite how younger generations fly budget airlines around the world – while boomers once saved for months for a student Interrail ticket, or the cheapest of fares for a Magic Bus ticket to Athens. 

But are we baby boomers too quick to throw younger generations under a bus?

New research has shown that millennials are struggling to save money with more than 58 per cent having a savings account under £3,000.

Seems they are trying hard to pay their way.

A recent survey done by Brainly, the world’s largest online learning community for students and parents, reveals more than half of the over 3,000 participants anticipate saving more money in the new year, more than 23% plan to partake in self-education/learning resolutions and 20% plan to spend less time procrastinating and improve time management.

Would it be fair for us baby boomers to come back with the reply they should have gotten their act together in the first place?

That would be a grand – and insensitive  –  position to take. The living standards think-tank, The Resolution Foundation has argued that baby boomers are indeed the chosen ones.

It seems we are set to receive 20% more in support from the State than we have chipped in. By comparison, the generation who come above are only up by 5%.

And, as you would expect, the millennials don’t even register and right now they’re screaming out at us boomers, in posh MacMillan voices, “You’ve never had it so good.”  

Have the boomers wrecked not only economic possibilities for the generations to come, the social order and the climate?

The millennials and  Generation Z can claim we created a world that gave us Suez, and the Cuban Missile Crises and Profumo, encouraged a collective arrogance which then allowed for the banking crisis – which resulted in austerity and zero-hours contracts and living off the Bank of Mum and Dad and staying at home until you reach 63.

They can also remind that we allowed for Till Death Us Do Part and Watergate and Vietnam and Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.  

O’Carroll fans however, could speak out for their comedy hero, and indeed cite the Irishman as an example of baby booming work ethic and tireless endeavourr; this man with the fake breasts and beige cardie is indeed a role model. 

What the younger generation won’t factor in is that it took O’Carroll 30 years to become an overnight star, and in the process of trying to hit the big time he worked as a cleaner, a window cleaner and a pub comic.

In the process, the father of three was bankrupt three times, toured endlessly for years across the UK and Ireland, and was once so skint and struggling to feed his family he once considered robbing a bank.

Yet there is little doubt that the younger generations’ complaints are partly fuelled by their own dark reality. They may have been driven to school but that doesn’t deny many have had to come to terms with the abhorrent concept of zero-hours contracts, lowering wages and the demise of protective trades unions. 

But it would be wrong to say the boomers don’t care. We realise that while mortgage rates are at their lowest for years (we were once strangled by 15% rates) low wages and high deposits make them unattainable. 

But is the generation gap ever widening thanks to economic/environmental horrors? (Millennials can’t understand why we pay windfarmers not to produce electricity.) Seems the chasm has widened since teenagers were invented in the 50s. 

Up until that point young men grew up desperate to become their fathers, wear a moustache, a bunnet, smoke a pipe and be seen to pontificate on the meaning of life. Young women were exactly the same about becoming their mothers (expect for the moustache, bunnet and pipe smoking.) Indeed, in Victorian Britain, young men would, rather incredibly, effect a stoop when walking in order to appear old.

Let’s hope the divide narrows. Let’s home the boomers, Generation X and X and every other letter of the alphabet realise we’re in this together. 

Mrs Brown would surely agree; we need to work towards our common interests without attention to age.