Thirty years ago, when Ireland was experiencing its last economic miracle, the dark side of progress was a housing crisis.
While the silhouettes of giant cranes dominated the skyline and a new breed of builders and property speculators got rich, the homeless were marching in the streets. The contrast between the conspicuous consumption of the new rich and the misery of those who could not be sure of a roof over their heads was so troubling that a respected High Court judge was asked to inquire into the problem.
In 1973, Mr Justice Kenny produced a detailed and well-argued report urging the Government to impose restrictions on speculation in building land. It was, in political circles, widely welcomed, broadly praised and thoroughly ignored.
Neither the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of 1973-1977 nor the Fianna Fail administration that replaced it did anything about the Kenny Report. There were dark mutterings about the Constitution and property rights, even though Mr Justice Kenny himself had established in court judgments that such rights were not absolute and that social justice had to be considered as well. But vague threats of constitutional action provided a convenient excuse not to offend a powerful interest group.
Now, in the midst of the second Irish economic miracle, housing has again been the area in which the problems of success are most apparent. Since the mid-1990s, the number of households on the waiting list for a house has crept steadily towards the 50,000 mark.
The economic boom and the rising population have created a massive demand for housing. Prices have been inflated beyond recognition, squeezing people who might have aspired to own their own house out of the market and pushing them onto the waiting lists for local authority houses. But the public sector house-building programme has hardly begun to recover from its virtual annihilation in the fiscal attrition of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And so a Government that has generally fled screaming from any notion of radical State intervention in the marketplace has had to respond with a Planning Bill that it has trumpeted, with a great deal of justification, as one of the most radical in the history of the State.
It proposes to force developers to sell up to 20 per cent of building land that they have purchased to local authorities at agricultural land prices for the construction of affordable houses. In a replay of the debate on the Kenny Report, there are again dark mutterings from the construction industry about private property and the Constitution.
Will Noel Dempsey's efforts to respond to the housing crisis go the way of Mr Justice Kenny's proposals in 1973? In determining the answer to that question, the political dynamic will be much more important than the legal arguments. For while the Planning Bill may be a blueprint for the future construction of Ireland, it is also a blueprint for the future reconstruction of Fianna Fail. If it collapses, the party's urgent attempts to distance itself from sleaze and get back in touch with its populist roots will have dangerously shallow foundations.
For Fianna Fail, housing has long been an issue of great symbolic, as well as practical, importance. And the symbolism has been decidedly ambiguous. On the one hand, the solid corporation housing estates on the edges of Irish cities are the living monuments to the party's populist heritage.
Fianna Fail can boast that it really began the process of creating a stock of decent houses for ordinary Irish people. In the 1930s and 1940s, Fianna Fail governments, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Department of Finance, cleared the slums of Dublin, Cork and Limerick, building 12,000 local authority houses a year. Much of the party's traditional urban working-class support is rooted in that achievement.
Even though the housing programme came to a halt after the war and was renewed by the Inter-Party coalition, it remained in the public mind the most tangible proof of Fianna Fail's commitment to social reform.
On the other hand, though, Haughey-era Fianna Fail created in the public mind a different and much less flattering connection between the party and building trade. And this darker image has been given substance of late by evidence at the Flood and Moriarty tribunals.
Builders allegedly seeking to have land rezoned by making large and apparently impulsive contributions to senior party figures. Haughey receiving large amounts of money from one of the most prodigious house-building companies of the modern era, the Gallagher Group. A murky world in which rezoning decisions can turn ordinary fields into gold mines and fast profits into grey ghettoes.
The old Fianna Fail gesture of pointing to the number of cranes against the skyline as evidence of progress has become an embarrassment. The image of the party bosses hand-in-glove with slick developers has become a long-term liability.
In that context, the sound of builders, auctioneers and surveyors on the radio news programmes attacking Noel Dempsey's proposals must be music to the party's ears. Nothing could more effectively banish the spectre that haunts the tribunals at Dublin Castle than this evidence that the party is willing to stand up to the property developers who have been for so long its financial mainstay.
This is not to suggest, of course, that the Planning Bill is a merely cynical exercise in political reconstruction. It is, on the contrary, a wide-ranging and carefully considered piece of work. But the political subtext does make it very difficult for the construction industry to win this time out. Housing will be a key issue in the next general election and the Government will have to be able to point to real progress.
Conversely, the spectacle of a Fianna Failled Government backing down under pressure from property developers against the background of continuing revelations at the tribunals would be little short of public political suicide.
In 1973, the homeless couldn't match the political clout of the developers and the notion that the rights of private property had to be tempered by the demands of social justice was quietly dropped.
This time, the homeless have unlikely allies in the disgraced politicians whose aura Noel Dempsey seems determined to banish. In a neat irony, Charles Haughey may have become the worst enemy Irish property developers ever had.