On the 6.30 a.m. radio news bulletin on the morning of the Budget, RTE's estimable economics correspondent speculated that Charlie McCreevy would advance the old age pension towards the symbolic figure of £100 millions a week.

George Lee's rare slip of the tongue was eloquent in its own way, speaking as it did of the extraordinary amounts of money that the Minister for Finance had at his disposal. While few can really have expected old age pensioners to enter the realms of the superrich, it seemed reasonable to suppose that they would at least get the £100 a week that was promised within the lifetime of this Government.

Strictly speaking, Charlie McCreevy did not have to reach this target this year. But it would have been a decent and painless gesture, easily within the reach of a Minister with an embarrassment of riches. It would also have been politically astute. £100 a week has a nice, round rhetorical ring to it. While the social effects of complex changes in the tax code can be hard to sum up in a soundbite, here was a measure that could encapsulate the humane spirit that Fianna Fail has always tried to cultivate.

A Minister who has a well-earned Thatcherite reputation to live down could have turned to his critics and said, "Hit me now with a £100 a week pensioner in my arms." And since Charlie McCreevy himself declared in his Budget speech that pensioners were "a priority", his course of action seemed bindingly obvious.

So what did he give the pensioners? A timid incremental advance that leaves them still £4 short of the magic number. Nothing better sums up the social conservatism and political ineptitude of the Budget.

At the end of a decade in which Fianna Fail ceased for the first time since the 1930s to be the natural party of government, Charlie McCreevy had a unique opportunity to make up lost ground. No Minister for Finance has ever had his freedom to be what Fianna Fail has always wanted to be - all things to all people. Yet, whether because of bungling, ideology or sheer perversity, he blew it.

In the days leading up to the Budget, the spin coming from Charlie McCreevy's office was that this was the moment when the Minister would shake off his Thatcherite image. His first budget had been flagrantly biased towards the rich. His second, last year, had seemed to signal, especially with its move towards the more equitable system of tax credits, a cautious but perceptible move towards a kinder, gentler McCreevy.

This time, the spin suggested, he would prove once and for all that he was a much misunderstood man. Far from being the outdated hard right ideologue he has appeared to be, he would emerge as a compassionate idealist with the words "social inclusion" imprinted on his heart.

Even if this was a mere figment of a spin-doctor's loquacity, it was, politically speaking, a very shrewd gesture. Fianna Fail desperately needs to restore its cross-class appeal, its image as the friend of the careworn plain people of Ireland. With so much money to spend, it seemed almost impossible not to achieve this. The opposition parties were braced for a Budget that would leave them flailing for substantial criticisms.

When the Budget was actually unveiled, however, they could revel in quietly gleeful expressions of dismay. For the spinning turned out to be a spectacularly incompetent exercise in the management of public opinion, raising expectations that the Minister clearly had no intention of meeting.

Charlie McCreevy did include a section called "social inclusion" in his Budget speech. It was full of all the approved rhetoric about the Government's commitment to "tackling poverty and disadvantage", ensuring that "the most vulnerable sections in our community share in the benefits of our successful economy" and meeting "the needs of disadvantaged individuals and communities". But behind the rhetoric there was very little evidence of an ambitious social vision. For the most part, the intention is not to eliminate disadvantage but to ameliorate its pain slightly.

Consider, for example, the changes in child benefit. Between a quarter and a third of Irish children live in poverty. The growth in the economy in recent years has not fundamentally altered the reality of their lives. And none of the conservative anti-welfare arguments about the incentive to work and the need to avoid dependency apply to these children.

They are not part of the labour force, they are inevitably dependent and they cannot be blamed for their own poverty. So even within the framework of the right-wing economics that Charlie McCreevy favours, there is absolutely no good reason not to make a decisive intervention on their behalf.

Child benefit is almost universally agreed to be the most direct and effective method of assisting the low-income families within which most of these children exist. Its effects are neutral as between those at work and those on welfare, so it does not add to the poverty traps that make it difficult for welfare recipients to move into the workforce.

Yet the Budget completely failed to make the kind of radical improvement in child benefit that the state of the public finances permits. Its big winners are the Dinkies (Dual Income No Kids). What the Budget gives to children is just over a tenth of what it gives in tax cuts that are skewed towards the better-off. And even the modest increases in child benefit that have been granted will not start to flow until September 2000.

Consider, too, what is perhaps the most generous gesture towards the disadvantaged in the Budget, the £28 million allocation to begin the process of improving services for people with mental disabilities. This is part of a three-year process which will involve the investment of a total of £80 million. But however welcome this kind of commitment may be, it can hardly, in the circumstances of contemporary Ireland, be regarded as a radical act of social justice.

To put it in its proper context, this £80 million which is to provide a basic standard of residential, day and respite care for all the mentally disabled people in the State might just about have been enough to purchase the 50 most expensive houses sold in Dublin in 1999. And its effect, when the investment programme is complete, will be merely to end a public scandal, not to create some wonderful new paradise.

The Government's hope is that, with this expenditure, it will have eliminated the waiting lists for essential services for the mentally handicapped by the end of 2002. Hardly a proud boast for one of the world's richest societies.

The timidity on issues such as child benefit, childcare and the plight of carers, and the tiny increases in welfare payments of £4 a week, may be the Budget's most substantial failures. But its political ham-fistedness is most evident in the decision to create a more favourable tax regime for married women working outside the home than for those working in the home.

Here, at least, there is a certain economic logic at work. But the obsession with this narrow logic betrays an extraordinary loss of what used to be Fianna Fail's unerring feel for the public mood.

At one level, since the economy is short of workers, it makes sense to discriminate in favour of those married women who stay in the workforce or can be attracted back into it. But even in these terms the Budget is cack-handed.

The largest consideration for many working couples with children is childcare. The cost of keeping a child in a creche all day can be so high that it effectively erodes the benefit of one income. Even in purely economic terms, it makes sense for one parent to stay at home. If Charlie McCreevy wanted to apply a coherent policy of encouraging two-worker families, tax relief for child care should have been his major priority. But it was not.

BUT AT another level, the Budget measures completely missed what is, in the eyes of most workers, the point of a booming economy.

Most people do not see themselves as servants of the economic miracle; they see the economic miracle as the servant of their hopes and desires. They do not want to be socially engineered by technocratic policymaking; they want to be able to engineer some choices in their own lives. Prosperity is supposed to increase choices, not to force everyone at all times to feed the economic machine.

And it is not even as if the Government can stay onside with the women in the workforce while alienating the women in the home. Anyone with a basic feel for the texture of contemporary Irish life would know that these are not two distinct and separate groups.

Many women in the workforce want the option to stay at home with their children at some stage in their working lives. Many women currently in the home see themselves returning to the workforce at some time. The Budget measures suggest to the first category that they must stay as they are and to the second that their current state is somehow invalid.

There was a time when a Fianna Fail Minister would not have to wait for a wave of hostile reaction to tell him this. But this week's ineptitude suggests that that time is long gone and that it will be a long time returning.