Mary Harney claims that the principles guiding the Progressive Democrats help them "to sort out the wheat from the chaff in policy proposals" and inspire them "to meet the real needs we see in Ireland today".
"In the Progressive Democrats," she wrote here last month, "we reject the attempt by the left to claim exclusive rights to social justice. We have a clear vision of what fairness and justice mean."
Charlie McCreevy would probably make the same claim - for the coalition and Fianna Fail. But when he discussed the subject with Olivia O'Leary on RTE 1he made no bones about it: this was a centre-right government, in happy contrast with the social democrats who govern most other states in the EU.
Bertie Ahern doesn't get into the ideological arguments pursued by Ms Harney, Mr McCreevy and the "let them eat cake" wing of the Government. But there's no doubt where he stands when the choice is between bread and circuses.
When it comes to sorting out the wheat from the chaff, the Taoiseach goes for the chaff every time. Whether you want a sports stadium to beat the one built in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics or a second chance to hear U2, Bertie's your man.
Ms Harney and Mr McCreevy favour what she calls "a low government burden on all forms of enterprise and initiative". So does Mr Ahern, with the obvious exceptions of sports grounds and pop concerts.
Indeed, he's so strongly opposed to Government intervention that, just in case Michael Woods decided to take a hand in the teachers' dispute, he packed him off to Malaysia for the week.
Remember how the Harney-McCreevy line urged us to follow Kuala Lumpur's example, with its small government, low taxes and few regulations? We got used to hearing about tiger economies and what they'd done for the Far East, what they might do for us.
And while we tune in to warnings of poor company returns and look over our shoulders at markets whose global jitters may force job losses here, we must ask how we stand and how we'd fare if the worst came to the worst.
This is one of the reasons why the argument between a centre-right government and its social democratic opponents is more than an academic debate; it's why politicians need to pay attention to the apparently academic differences between economists and sociologists.
IT matters to all of us whether we have a society organised on European social democratic lines or follow the tougher US way with its seductive motto: winner takes all. The choice is between Boston and Berlin.
Ms Harney takes exception to the claims of the left and points to the achievements of her own centre-right coalition, especially in employment and income tax.
"The tremendous increase in employment has done more to alleviate poverty than anything any government welfare programme has done or could ever do," she writes. And on criticism of the coalition's tax policies: "If our tax cuts were so unjust why don't our opponents promise to raise taxes?"
Yet unemployment had begun to fall in the mid-1990s, long before the election of the FF-PD coalition. And the argument about taxation is not as crude as she and the coalition's "payback time" supporters made it sound.
The debate is not about "government welfare programmes". It's about the way in which alternative administrations use, or propose to use, the greatest store of resources which Irish governments have had at their disposal. It's about facing the challenge which wealth as well as poverty presents.
Irish society and its political leaders have been faced with the challenge again and again even in the recent past. And more often than not they've been found wanting.
The Budget, the Social Welfare Bill and the lately-published Finance Bill tell a mean and, in the light of Ms Harney's claims, brazenly hypocritical story. As the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) put it: "An increase of £8 a week for the poorest versus £200plus for Ministers highlights the widening gap."
This, say Sean Healy and Bridget Reynolds of CORI, is a double injustice to the poor and to the wider society, increasing the gap between the poor and the rest of society and deepening social divisions.
Yet the damage won't be undone by what Ms Harney calls a welfare programme. Deep divisions are not healed by piecemeal remedies or the interventions of charity, however well meant.
They call for intervention by a determined government with a detailed programme covering a whole range of issues - health, housing, education and the environment. They need to be tackled centrally if voluntary local effort is to prove successful.
We may show improvements in employment; we also have one of the most poorly-paid workforces in the EU. Many more have the advantage of third-level education than in the 1960s; we still have a high level of dropouts, often caused by financial necessity.
Even when it comes to pensions, as Gerard Hughes of the ESRI points out, the inequity which pervades our society persists.
During the debate on the Finance Bill, Labour's Derek McDowell quoted the secretary general of the Department of Health saying that a low-tax, low-spend economy leads to an inadequate health service.
Mr McDowell commented: "That one crisp, devastating sentence summarised where we find ourselves at the start of the 21st century. Although our GNP and GDP per capita are among the richest in Europe, and indeed the world, our health service, schools and roads are among the poorest."
We need a social democratic response.