One of the best ways of gauging how you really feel about an issue is to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. How would you feel if you were insulted purely because of the colour of your skin? If you were forced to live by the side of the road, with no running water? If employers hinted that you didn't get the promotion because you had children at home? If "No Irish need apply"?
The usual rationalisations we make to explain other people's problems fall away under such an exercise. None of us wants to be discriminated against. And yet, when it comes to issues of human rights, many people talk with their blinkers firmly on.
For a start, human rights are often considered a problem found only in far-away places. The assumption that "West is best" underlies a lot of thinking. Corruption in the developing world is "endemic"; corruption in Ireland is something we deal with in tribunals. People walk past beggars in Dublin to enter Third World thrift shops. Africa's problems are "tribal"; the North's are "sectarian".
There is also a tendency not to see the mote in one's own eye. Endless reports from what is now scathingly referred to as "the poverty industry" are explained away. Concerns over civil liberties are flattened in the race to obtain a political consensus. In a society of individualists, me fein tends to win out over sinn fein.
It's true that Ireland is a stable parliamentary democracy, with an independent press and judiciary. As the US State Department's human rights report states, the Government "generally respects" the rights of its citizens.
But how much of the credit for this is due to the same independent judiciary and to the EU for dragging Ireland into a legal and social modernity over the past 20 years? Battles over issues such as equal pay or homosexuality would never have been won without the assistance and leadership which came from these quarters when it was needed.
Relics of the old regime remain firmly on the statute book, however; for example, the 1923 Censorship of Films Act and the 1946 Censorship of Publications Act, or the 1963 Official Secrets Act, which gives the State wide scope to prosecute unauthorised disclosures of sensitive Government information.
In fact, the Republic is fast developing a panoply of emergency legislation that many an oppressive state would be proud of. The Omagh bombing prompted the Minister for Justice to introduce anti-terrorist legislation he himself described as "draconian". A number of senior opposition figures expressed reservations, but still voted for the Bill.
Amnesty International also objected, claiming the legislation violated the fundamental right to silence and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. "We find the Government's proposals perplexing because, just a month ago, they joined with more than 100 other states to create an international criminal court (ICC) which would try people accused of the most heinous crimes known to the world - genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity," the organisation said.
"The Government supported the right to silence, the right to be informed without delay of charges, and the right to have a lawyer present during interrogation in the ICC, yet it will be denying its own citizens these same rights if these proposals become law."
Amnesty's calls for video-taping of police interviews were brushed aside once more. These date back to 1996 and the cases of Jeremiah Sheehy and John Quinn, who were being questioned in relation to the murder in Limerick of Garda detective Jerry McCabe.
During their interrogation, both suspects had to be taken to hospital repeatedly; Quinn's lawyer said he sustained injuries to the head and body, and both men appeared injured when they were brought to court. Amnesty said a human rights researcher was threatened with arrest when she interviewed other suspects in the case. No official action has been taken in either of these cases.
The State Department report points to other areas of concern. It describes our prisons as "barely adequate" and plagued by chronic overcrowding (though new facilities have since been built). The freedom of the press is constrained by a requirement not to publish or utter "blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter". In practice, this and other laws lead to self-censorship, it says.
It further notes that the Catholic church controls virtually all primary and secondary schools, and that women are under-represented in government and politics. It describes the travellers as "the single most discriminated against ethnic group" in Ireland.
Perhaps of late, they have been joined by asylum-seekers, who have been pilloried by Government ministers, politicians and the Department of Justice, and who are denied the right to work.
A selective picture? Not if you're a traveller, an asylum-seeker or a prisoner. Standards in human rights are set by our treatment of the weakest in society, not the strongest.
The recent human development report from the United Nations Development Programme puts the matter in some perspective: Ireland is clearly a desirable country to live in, ranking 17th out of 175 nations surveyed. Its social standards are also some way above the level you expect from average income levels, for which Ireland ranks 25th.
However, the report also looked at inequalities and poverty within the wealthy countries. On this score, Ireland fares badly, ranking second-last of the 17 Western states surveyed. Levels of illiteracy and long-term unemployment were among the highest recorded, and women were worse off economically relative to men than anywhere else.
So the next time someone says "it's a grand little country", think again. The Celtic Tiger phenomenon is proof not of our success, but of the challenge we face in improving our society.