Western attitudes to human rights and the Third World are riddled with contradictions. We give aid to poor countries, then take back four times as much in debt repayments. We protest about killings in faraway places, blithely ignoring the fact that the weapons used were probably made closer to home.
Irish people are generous in their donations to Africa, but we say nothing when our heavily subsidised beef is dumped on local markets, cutting the ground from under local farmers. To Western eyes, India - hugely corrupt, half-starving, cruel India - is better than China, which has achieved the miracle of feeding its huge population. Better to vote on an empty stomach, we seem to say, than to be well fed and have no vote at all.
In Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia are seen as better than Rwanda and Burundi, even though none of the four states has anything remotely resembling a democracy.
So it's no wonder that in recent years some developing countries have begun talking back when confronted with more finger-wagging from the West. Fifty years of the West talking about eradicating poverty hasn't eradicated poverty. The motives of the "Asian values" lobby may be mixed, but it's worth considering the arguments.
Peace, development and human rights are the three prongs of the United Nations Charter. Since the end of the Cold War, the latter two objectives have grown in importance. In the process, they have become intermingled.
The traditional view limits human rights to civil and political rights. Included among these are the right to life and security; the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, etc; press freedoms; and the right to vote.
But increasingly, this view is being challenged. Some, including Mary Robinson, say it is too limited. They call for a more holistic approach, one that embraces social, cultural and economic rights. These would include the right to an adequate standard of living; the right to education; the right to work; and the rights of minorities to enjoy their own culture and language.
As Mrs Robinson points out, democracy and human rights will prove elusive without social justice and sustainable development. "Poverty deprives millions of their fundamental rights. Societies, in turn, are deprived of these people's contributions. Achieving sustainable progress requires recognising the interdependence between respect for human rights, sustainable development and democracy."
The problem is to get the balance right between the different rights. Progress was hard enough when human rights were more narrowly defined; now, by broadening the concept, campaigners risk diluting their energies even further. That would play into the hands of the oligarchies and regimes that control so many Third World countries and which are so reluctant to share power.
Malaysia provides a good case study of the conflicts that can arise over different types of rights. While the economy grew, the country's freedom deficits were less apparent. Now that its financial affairs are in a spin, it seems a lot less progressive than before. Locking up your main opposition leader on sodomy charges is stunningly unoriginal.
Yet Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamed sees Asians as victims of Western conspiracies. He has blamed a biased, racist, foreign media for disseminating the view that the Asian financial crisis was due to corrupt and incompetent governments.
Dr Mahathir's friends in Burma have repeatedly invoked Asian values to justify crushing that country's democracy movement. Western governments have condemned Burma's human rights abuses but they have done little to stop their companies trading there.
Not all the people on this side of the argument have so many vested interests as Dr Mahathir. An Indian writer Winin Pereira, put it thus: "Western policies regarding human rights are carefully planned and stage-managed hypocrisy. These policies - and the violations that result from them - are not the passing aberration of a few immoral individuals but official directives, `legally' enacted and implemented over centuries".
Pereira maintains that most the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration have been used to shore up oppression against the poor of the world.
But the victims and perpetrators of Western-style human rights are more easy to identify. This is, perhaps, why we react more strongly to a massacre in Tiananmen Square than we do to a story about famine in Africa.
Closer to home, it behoves us to examine how we measure up according to the broader definition of human rights. Ireland may be an oasis of political stability in the world, but how equal a society is it?
Not very equal, if the recent human development report of the UN Development Programme is anything to go by. This found that Ireland had the second highest concentration of poverty of 17 Western nations, after the United States. Levels of illiteracy and long-term unemployment were among the highest recorded and women were worse off economically relative to men than anywhere else.
The beam, it seems, might be in our own eye.