Take the State's pensioners, allocated another £10 a week in the Budget. Come April, what will it buy them? With inflation edging 7 per cent and a tank of heating oil nearly doubling in price in the past few years, not many will be ordering the cheeseboard in Guilbaud's. Charlie McCreevy's visionary move in setting aside a special pension fund for post-2025 pensioners carries its own irony; it will ensure that our pampered cubs - the ones fuelling the same cheeseboard prices - can age with confidence, while the already strapped elderly are forced to make yet more sacrifices on their behalf.
Take the disabled. The £8 extra doled out in the Budget will change nothing, says John Dolan, of the Disability Federation of Ireland. "When the dust has settled, 70 per cent of households with disability will still be living below the poverty line." While education opportunities may be improving (too often by dint of hard-won court battles against the State), a new report shows that just 23 per cent of disabled people in Co Kerry are employed, even though 80 per cent are "ready, able and willing" to work. "The research confirms what we've always known about the exclusion and marginalisation of disabled people," says Jacqui Browne, chairwoman of the Kerry Network of People with Disabilities.
Many of them are probably among the 200,000 people the Society of St Vincent de Paul estimates are living in poverty; and poverty in this context means going without a warm overcoat or a second pair of shoes. The society's clientele also includes many of the 25 per cent of Irish adults said to be functionally illiterate. Doubtless, it also includes some of the chronically low-paid who have been floating into the public consciousness in recent times, leaving many to wonder how employers in a booming economy have managed to square their consciences with their profits.
"I thought the Budget was a very orthodox budget for an increasingly unorthodox world," says Gerard O'Neill, of Amarach Consulting, which specialises in business forecasting. "What we should have been looking at - as suggested by CORI [Conference of Religious of Ireland] among others - was the whole issue of a basic income scheme for all. We are an increasingly affluent people; we could afford to make such a commitment."
But if Government and employers have not been as generous and visionary as they might, where stand Joe and Josephine Citizen? Their hearts might be in the right place (as shown in the outcry over Mary Ellen Synon's attack on the disabled), but do their heads follow?
The hysteria over BSE-transmitted CJD has led to proposals that millions of healthy cattle carcasses be destroyed simply to restore public confidence - in other words, purely for PR purposes - in a world containing 826 million malnourished people, according to UN statistics. Yet, the only publicly uttered outrage has come, ironically, from the head of the Food Safety Authority.
The Simon Community's Irish volunteer corps has virtually disappeared. The number of Irish people volunteering to work for the organisation has dropped to 17 per cent of what it was 10 years ago; it now relies on Continental Europeans and Americans to make up the shortfall. The Society of St Vincent de Paul is in similar straits. Organisations, such as CORI, note that pensioners, for example, who could once rely on the goodwill of neighbours for errands and repairs, often no longer have these supports. People are prepared to throw money at worthy causes, but not time. And as hands-on charity work and neighbourliness are among the few decent means by which the haves can bear testimony to the lives of the have-nots, another opportunity to understand and raise the public consciousness is lost. And so the gulf between the two becomes increasingly unbridgeable and the already fragile sense of community weakens further.
While we wait, and wait, for strong, vocal, political leadership on issues such as racism, corruption and emotional and material poverty, or pray for someone - anyone - to articulate a vision that will restore our pride in something other than GDP and economic success, those traits that made us different, the kind that fuelled many an emigrant's yearning to return to their native land, are slipping away.
The decline in community in parallel with economic success has been much remarked upon in recent years; not simply the fall-off in volunteerism, but in the rise of random aggressiveness, the erosion of civility, the disappearance of trust.
"We have achieved the standard of living targets, but missed the quality of life," says Gerard O'Neill. "One of the things I would like to see from politicians is more leadership in terms of what Ireland will be like in 10 years time, of a kind that goes beyond standards of living and how we compare with other EU countries.
"A story needs to be told about aspects of life that lend themselves less readily to measurement - like the environment, community, the distribution of time. What we see for example, is the generation aged 50plus with a lot of free time on its hands and the generation from 25 to 50 with its two-income households, working flat out, so that they have less time than their parents had at the same life stage. That story needs to be told, and along with it a commitment to something like a four-day working week by 2010. That would be a very, very brave move, one that would go straight to the quality of life."
He is not optimistic, however. "I don't see any sign of such leadership, not at the moment." As in other western democracies, politicians have become increasingly reactive, allowing themselves to be led by focus groups instead of assuming the positions of leadership to which they were elected.
The demand will come from the people though; of that he is sure. The popular discontent erupting around us stems from something more profound than financial need. But by the time someone articulates this, will the opportunity for change have passed? As we adapt to a new reality, are we already too late?