So far the main beneficiaries of the Celtic Tiger had been the rich, a SIPTU economist Mr Paul Sweeney told the conference.
"The greedy have always said that we have to make money before we can share it. That time has now come."
While most people in the Republic had seen their incomes rise substantially over the past 12 years, Mr Sweeney said that we must now share our unprecedented wealth in new ways, if we were to sustain a healthy economy and society.
More of our wealth had to go to the disadvantaged, to workers through a more equitable distribution of profits and to society as a whole through increased investment in areas like transport, education and other infrastructural needs. "In the last few years Government distributed income and wealth upwards to those who had benefited most in the Celtic Tiger economy.
"The halving of capital gains tax, the huge reduction in taxes on profits to only 12.5 per cent, the abolition of tiny property taxes, which has fuelled house prices dramatically, and continuing grants and incentives to investment have gone to these groups", he said.
"The return on capital in Ireland has been amongst the highest in the OECD, at over 17 per cent, and there has been a dramatic shift in the share of the national cake going from labour to capital in recent years.
"The three primary objectives of a successful economy are high sustainable growth, full employment and an acceptable distribution of wealth. Ireland has been immensely successful in the first one, very good in targeting the second, but abysmal in the third."
Irish culture should no longer be regarded as a vulnerable, pristine inheritance that improving economic fortunes should be used to promote, but an important economic and social force in its own right, Ms Honor Fagan of the National University, Maynooth, told the conference.
Globalisation of the economy and communications had altered the role of culture because they had altered the way in which people saw the world.
There was now a global cultural economy, and Irish people should not allow themselves to be restricted by the "nation-state script" which had been handed down by the generation of Eamon de Valera. "Globalisation has redefined tradition", she said.
"It is not just the distant past but also the `tradition' of modernity. In this sense the `Ireland' constructed in the 1920s is as invented as the `young European Ireland' of today."
Ireland's new cultural products had found a niche in the world market because they had responded to and interacted with the new distributions of people, technology, capital, media and ideas. Local cultures both resisted and fed the emerging global cultures, she said.
"Rather than Irish `culture' being weakened by global culture, or rather than resisting global culture, Irish culture is being produced at an amazingly tigerish pace to feed the production of global culture."
She said a political economy of the Celtic Tiger was urgently needed, which explained why our culture had been so successful in feeding and fuelling global culture.