`We cannot continue to pay hundreds of millions of pounds to one sector while expecting other sectors to quietly acquiesce."
Bedad, says I, listening to reports from the Dail on Tuesday, Bertie Ahern has taken the effin' words out of me effin' mouth.
But, of course, he hadn't. He was talking about the nurses. In our humbler station, we had a different sector and other millions in mind.
So had Walton Empey, the Archbishop of Dublin, and the venerable archdeacon, Gordon Linney, who was addressing diocesan synods of the Church of Ireland on the day that Ahern addressed the Dail.
The archdeacon asked: "How can a Government which has failed to confront its friends in business over recent years now take such a line with a group of the most dedicated people in society?"
The answer is: with a hard neck, like the rest of the moneybores who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Moneybores speak only of cost, and in the tidy terms of financial orthodoxy. Ask about services to improve the quality of life and they'll invite you to ignore the quality and feel the millions.
They have a set of commandments devised, revised and adapted to their own convenience. And, if you insist, they'll decorate their answers with percentages and graphs.
Dig deeper and you'll find yourself back where you started. As they say, the bottom line is cost and the only recognised value is value for money. These are the fundamentals.
It sounds like religion. And it is. The chief moneybores - Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney - are its high priests. Ahern is its absent-minded leader. They and their missionaries in business and banking take their cue from theologians versed in accountancy and economics and pass on their message via acolytes in journalism and law.
Moneybores quibble about the level of poverty; they will argue about definitions for as long as it helps them to avoid the issue.
The last thing they want to do is to spend time and money on a problem which, as they see it, often arises from a form of moral turpitude.
(It's why we still have that quintessentially Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.)
Anything is better than recognising that we've never been richer and deciding what is to be done now that we have the power to make this a fairer place.
But it's a funny old country when the sharpest thorns in the new church's side are a bishop and an archdeacon of the Church of Ireland, the leader of a conference of Catholic priests and nuns, Sean Healy, and the governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan.
Their contributions to the critique of Irish society as we enter the 21st century are sometimes praised for the plainness and passion of their statements. Praised and patronised. Passion is all very well, say the hard chaws. In the real world it won't bring home the bacon.
But, to adapt a comment of that plain-spoken and passionate cleric, Sydney Smith: to say that a view is flawed because it's clear is as foolish as to assume that, because a case is made with impenetrable jargon, it must be true.
The Linneys, the Healys and the Lonergans know that if we are to dispel a growing sense of confusion we must dispense with some of the easy assumptions that go with the impenetrable jargon.
One of these assumptions is that the worst of all offences, in periods of prosperity as in days of poverty, is to raise questions and rock the boat.
Any group suspected of boat-rocking - as the nurses are suspect now - is liable to be held responsible for a range of problems not of its making, some of which may have been festering for a long time.
It's an easy, lazy and irresponsible way to avoid confronting issues that have been staring us in the face for years. An excuse the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats coalition grasps with an air of desperation.
No wonder. Fianna Fail now finds itself with a former leader and Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, whose affairs are under scrutiny simultaneously in Dublin Castle and the High Court. His immediate successor, Albert Reynolds, has yet to explain whether and why, as minister for finance, he helped persuade a bank to write off a backbencher's debt of £250,000.
AND Bertie Ahern, who succeeded Reynolds, has given up trying to remember whether or why he signed dozens, maybe hundreds, of cheques for Haughey, his mentor and one-time colleague.
On top of this there's industrial clamour on several fronts, with little evidence that the Government is working on a strategy which would encourage agreement and suggest a vision fit for the new century.
Indeed, not since 1982 has there been such a conspiracy of events - the coming together of past mistakes and imminent challenges, all adding to growing uncertainty about the future.
What the Government faces is an accumulation of problems. Ministers and their allies fail, or refuse, to see that the nurses' case is neither isolated nor simple.
It's compounded by problems in the health services generally, by serious difficulties in other areas like housing and by appalling standards among those who see themselves as an elite in public life.
The fact that the Government carries on as if nurses and even more poorly paid workers in both public and private sectors can't see or hear what's happening among the elite adds insult to injury. But the Government has both the power and the resources to set about a resolution of immediate and medium-term issues, even if it seems to lack the will to behave rationally in the nurses' case.
Three documents now in the course of preparation will have a powerful influence on the way we start the new century. The three, not necessarily in the order of appearance, are: the Budget for 2000, an agreement (or agreement to disagree) on social partnership for 2000 to 2003, and the national plan for 2000 to 2006.
ESRI reports point, in carefully neutral terms, to our present and potential prosperity. An ESRI paper, Budget Perspectives, published last month, suggested what needs to be done.
"A focus on Budget day decisions regarding tax and social welfare," it said, "must not be allowed to distract attention from the structural areas which must be tackled in the medium to long term.
"For example, issues such as early school-leaving and the entry rate to third-level education among many social groups may require a much broader programme of intervention than has previously been considered."
The headway made on employment is welcome. The problems of housing, education, training and health remain. If social exclusion is to be tackled, now is the time to do it.
Government after government has promised that all we lacked were the resources. But we live in a world in which revision is more likely than vision and generosity is a quality more evident in the workforce than among those who claim to lead us.