Cardinal Cahal Daly has said the recent debate following the Budget showed there was a strong sense of social concern among many Irish people.
"That debate, I believe, showed that the Irish public have not been infected to the extent sometimes feared by selfishness and individualism or me-feinism," he said yesterday. "There is among many a strong sense of social concern, a sense of solidarity with the low-paid and the poor, a broad consensus that the poor should be helped before the rich are further rewarded."
Dr Daly was giving the first of a millennium series of lectures at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.
"The Irish public have, I believe, a desire not to let our new prosperity undermine our traditional values of sharing and caring for the weak and the excluded. Irish people still cherish the values of the Sermon on the Mount and they wish to keep the spirit of the Gospel from being replaced by the Dow Jones Index," he said.
They cared about children and wished fathers and mothers to be helped juggle mortgage payments and the demands of the workplace with the needs of their own young children, the cardinal said. "The Irish people do care for human and spiritual values, indeed, Christian values, and not just economic values."
He felt politicians "who have a Christian vision of their task - and there are still, I thank God, many of these" could take courage from these indications of public attitudes.
"They should be reassured that there will be public and indeed political support for policies which give priority to a fairer distribution of hope and opportunity across all sections of the community. There will be support for the social and economic and budgetary provisions which are the precondition for a more just and more inclusive society," he said.
It remained the case that one in 10 Irish households was still experiencing serious deprivation. Furthermore, the income and standard of living gap between the poor and the rest of society was widening. Closely associated with persistent poverty was functional illiteracy "and Ireland, to our shame, is at near the bottom of industrial societies in terms of the percentage of its working-age population who are illiterate", Dr Daly said.
While funding for education had been increased, still more funding was needed, he said, "and it must be weighted in favour of the more deprived sectors".
He also felt that the business and financial sector could earn enhanced respect by contributing, perhaps in partnership with Government, to programmes of economic and social rehabilitation in deprived areas.
