It's been a bad week for those who demand lower taxes for the better off and insist that public spending must be cut, if necessary at the expense of public service.
A week ago an Irish Times/MRBI poll showed that the public had set health, housing and the gap between rich and poor at the head of a list of issues on which the next election should be fought.
Whether these are the issues on which the election will be fought is another matter. If the pattern of the 1997 campaign is followed, they won't. Far from being the centre of political attention, they'll be overshadowed by questions of cost and tax, shouted down by slogans like "It's payback time".
Health, housing and the gap between rich and poor were not at the top of the Dail's agenda when it met on Tuesday after an unconscionable delay. But, in one form or another, they were in the news every day since, in the High Court, at the Lindsay tribunal, in a powerful series of articles in The Irish Times, and in continuing argument about wages, inflation and our choice between the European and American ways of conducting our affairs.
Mr Justice Barr's High Court judgment in favour of Mrs Kathryn Sinnott of Ballinhassig, Co Cork, and her autistic son, Jamie, was accompanied by devastating criticism of the State's failure to meet its constitutional obligations to provide education for citizens with special needs. The failure, the judge said, was symptomatic of a widespread malaise. In Mr Jamie Sinnott's case, the Department of Finance had "persistently dragged its feet". And in a struggle which the judge called intelligent, selfless and heroic, Mrs Sinnott had had to contend with "official indifference and persistent procrastination" which continued up to and during the trial.
Worse still, as we now know, the Sinnott case was heard seven years after a similar judgment was delivered - and appealed - by the Fianna Fail-Labour coalition when Mr Bertie Ahern was minister for finance and Mrs Niamh Breathnach of Labour was minister for education.
On Thursday the Irish Examiner published official exchanges between their Departments which showed that, far from achieving clarity, the effect of the appeal was to keep parents of handicapped children in the dark and to save money.
When Dr Michael Woods was asked yesterday if the Government now intended to appeal the Sinnott judgment, he waffled. When the question was repeated, he waffled again.
It's a question for the Government, for the Attorney General, for interested parties . . . He couldn't say . . .
Maev-Ann Wren's series, "An Unhealthy State", published in this newspaper this week, is a carefully researched, coolly written, yet damning indictment, if not of the health service as a whole, then of the pretence that it serves well those who cannot afford to pay for it.
It is, as she says, rapidly moving towards an American-style system where people's ability to pay delivers access to care. With around 45 per cent of the population thought to be covered by the private sector, she concludes that if private cover continues to grow, the fate of public patients may cease to be an issue which exercises most politicians.
As in the US, Ireland's system will be essentially dominated by private insurance companies, leaving people without private insurance to the General Medical Scheme or without cover.
The major reason the health service in Ireland is not as good as in many EU states is simply that they spend more money on it than we do, Wren wrote, arguing that the increase for this year, announced with great fanfare last November as "Health breaks the £4 billion barrier" was an increase of some £500 million or three-quarters of 1 per cent of GNP.
But this would not alter Ireland's position in the international league tables of health spending to the degree that might be expected: last year Ireland spent 4.7 per cent of GDP when the EU and OECD average was about 6 per cent.
In the annual report of the Department of Health's chief medical officer, Dr Jim Kiely, inequalities are underlined: "There is evidence that the less well off in society have poorer access to health services."
Wren suggests alternative models which might be chosen by a government with a mandate to bring in equitable healthcare: Labour's proposal to extend insurance cover to everyone, with the State paying for those who cannot afford the premiums, and the introduction of common waiting lists for public and private patients in public hospitals, as proposed by the Commission on Health Funding. But Labour is the only party to have produced a detailed, well-argued scheme.
And at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Mr Dan McLaughlin, an economist with ABN Ambro, argues that, as spending increases but people hardly feel they're getting a better service, spending cuts might be tried.
In an article in the Irish Independent on Thursday, he called it "The solution that dare not speak its name". Perhaps he should look again at what happened in the late 1980s and what effect cuts made then had on public services all round.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie