When, 12 years ago, George Soros took speculative advantage of the vulnerability of the over-valued sterling currency within the European Monetary System to add a billion or so to his wealth, that sum added to his already great capacity for constructive philanthropy - a philanthropy which includes half-a-billion dollars a year directed towards helping the development of central and eastern European countries such as his native Hungary, which he left at the age of 17.
When, some years ago, I was asked to help with a project of his in Bulgaria, he expressed to me his amused puzzlement at the fact that he had been unable in 1992 to attack the Irish pound at the same time as he had helped to bring down sterling.
This appears to have been because our Central Bank had wisely ensured that there were too few Irish pounds available at that time to be used for speculative purposes!
As a result our pound, which on the advice of my economic adviser, Patrick Honohan, had been successfully devalued by 8 per cent in 1986, survived for a further four months after the collapse of sterling.
I believe that our spirited defence of the Irish currency at that time - much criticised by some of our less politically astute economists - played its part in setting the scene for the Celtic Tiger, for it showed that we were serious rather than opportunistic players on the international financial scene
Visiting Ireland for a meeting of a group with which he is associated, George Soros addressed a meeting in Trinity College on Thursday at which I was asked to share the platform with him.
After his remarks he answered, with his customary wit and wisdom, a wide range of questions, most of them from students of the college.
Central to that debate was his recent short and punchy book, The Bubble Of American Supremacy - Correcting The Misuse Of American Power, which has been described by Prof Joseph Stiglitz as "brilliantly demonstrating how the mechanisms that have created American strong-market capitalism, the rule of law and the moral authority of the United States, are at risk from the supremacist attitudes of some in Washington."
However, this short book offers much more than an indictment of the Bush administration: it also incorporates a strong statement of the case for what we in Europe know as social democracy, as well as practical proposals on how the world political system centred on the UN might be made to work effectively for peace and progress, and how democracy might be effectively promoted at a global level. Quite simply, it is a great read.
The achievements of the George Soros Foundations have included financial support for 35,000 Soviet scientists facing extreme poverty at a crucial point in Russia's difficult economic adjustment; a campaign which led the British government to take action to promote transparency on the part of extractive industries worldwide; and the mobilisation of nine eastern European countries to launch a 10-year programme for greater inclusion of the oppressed Roma population. (We in Ireland could do with pressure of that kind here in relation to our marginalised Travellers).
George Soros also forced President Bush's hand when, at the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development two years ago, there was an attempt to mislead opinion on the scale of the proposed US Millennium Challenge Account. This led to the doubling of the intended US contribution. In other words, George Soros is a useful man to have around. Would that there were more billionaires like him!
The chapter on globalisation in his book is one of the most compelling. He notes the benefits globalisation can provide, accelerating economic growth, but adds that the sum of gross national products is not an adequate measure of human welfare. The market system facilitates the free exchange of goods and services among willing participants, but markets "are not capable on their own of taking care of collective needs. Nor are they competent to secure social justice. These public goods can only be provided by a political process".
And he goes on to show that the form of globalisation effectively imposed on the world by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher a quarter of a century ago, which sought with some success to remove the state from the economy, severely curtailed the state's capacity to provide public goods for its citizens (witness the British railway system).
This was because it interfered with what George Soros describes as "the most convenient and copious source of revenue, namely the taxation of incomes and profits, while reducing or eliminating customs duties at the same time. . .
"Taxes on capital and employment have come down, while other forms of taxation (particularly on consumption), have continued to ratchet upward. In other words the burden of taxation has shifted from the owners of capital to the consumers, from the rich to the poor and middle class . . . One cannot describe \\ as unintended, because that was precisely what the market fundamentalists intended."
The consequence of this has been, he points out, a growing inequality between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries. "The increased wealth produced by globalisation could be used to make up for the inequities, and there would still be some extra wealth left over.
"The trouble is that the winners do not compensate the losers either within states or between states. The welfare state as we know it has become unsustainable, and international income redistribution is practically non-existent."
Nevertheless there remains, I believe, enough room for wise governments to seek to limit within their own jurisdiction the damage done by this right-wing manipulation of globalisation. And in Ireland there is a tradition of mutual support and caring which a government could draw on to protect its people from the worst ravages of that process.
Thus up to the 1980s, despite being by far the poorest country in northern Europe, Irish governments of both complexions - Fianna Fáil as well as Fine Gael-Labour - engaged in substantial redistribution of resources in favour of the less well off.
But in the 1990s our political system became infected with the Reagan-Thatcher virus. What might be described as the social democratic element in Fianna Fáil has since found itself outgunned by right-wing colleagues, closely aligned with the Progressive Democrats, and the weakness and lack of self-confidence of the opposition seems up to now to have inhibited a serious intellectual challenge to the resultant right-wing orthodoxy; whose proponents, I would judge, actually constitute a minority of the members of the Dáil.
Not for the first time the rigidities of our party structure, in combination with an electorate many of whom still vote on traditional party lines without much regard to issues of policy, seem to me to be standing in the way of allowing our people's better instincts to be reflected in the policies pursued by those to whom we entrust the management of our affairs.