One evening last week I switched on RTÉ's Five Seven Live and heard David McWilliams giving an account of what he had just said to a meeting of Fine Gael TDs, writes Garret FitzGerald.
I was startled by the political advice that he said he had given to the parliamentarians - so much so that I reached for a pen and scribbled down as much as I could of his remarks.
At the outset he said that he was speaking as an economist, but by his own account he devoted his remarks to offering political advice as to how to win the next election by seeking the votes of young, well-off voters in the east of the country.
He said the area west of a line "from Bushmills to east Cork is more or less sewn up because it is more or less where traditional civil war party politics [ prevail] and its patterns will replicate themselves".
His reason for proposing that Fine Gael concentrate on better-off voters was, he said, that the numbers in upper socioeconomic groups had risen sharply between 1996 and 2002, while the number in the lowest economic group had fallen by 31 per cent.
Many of the better-off were now concentrated in counties around Dublin, which he listed.
And he added that these were people "who don't vote at all".
Asked whether this approach would be justified by better-off people having difficulty in making ends meet - as had been suggested earlier in the programme - he said this was not the case. A survey published by the European Commission last year had shown that we have the second-lowest proportion in Europe who feel that they are in such a situation.
Finally, when asked by the interviewer to explain who was going to look after the less well-off if politicians took his advice to concentrate on securing the votes of better-off voters, he contented himself with the lame response that, while welfare rates had "not kept up, there has been quite a lot of income redistribution, and that will remain the case".
I have a number of problems with David McWilliams's approach to these issues.
He is right in remarking that there has been a shift in the composition of the population away from manual workers and towards the middle class.
However, this shift is a good deal smaller than he suggests, for he has taken no account of the increase of over 50 per cent in the number of people who in the 2002 census failed to state their occupation. This was apparently because they misinterpreted instructions on the census form.
This appears to have distorted, by well over 200,000, the figures for all the remaining categories.
Again, his dismissal of Ireland west of the Bushmills-east Cork line as "sewn up" in civil war voting patterns that "replicate themselves" is totally misleading.
Of the dozen seats that Fine Gael has the best chance of winning in the next election half are in the area west of his line.
So also are two-thirds of that party's dozen other possible, but less likely, gains.
If Fine Gael was, therefore, to take his advice to ignore that part of the country it would be certain to lose the next election.
His assertion that people who live in the counties around Dublin "don't vote at all" is also misleading.
In the city and county of Dublin the turnout is very low, but in the eight constituencies within the Dublin hinterland identified by him the turnout in the last election was 60.8 per cent.
While that is lower than in the more western counties, it is only marginally below the national average of 62 per cent.
I do not think we need to worry about Fine Gael being misled by all this. It can, no doubt, look after itself.
However, what bothered and indeed shocked me about this presentation was its exclusively power-orientated emphasis, and the omission of - indeed, the effective dismissal of - any reference to what politics is about: namely deciding on policies to make changes in the economy and society in the public interest.
Political parties are, quite properly, concerned with securing office by winning elections. Towards that end they will present the best face possible to the electorate, emphasising aspects of their policies that may be popular.
They play down or sometimes even remain silent about possible policy changes that might lose votes from certain sections of the community.
However, to suggest that, instead of seeking office to make necessary changes in society, parties should just tailor their policies to the attainment of power for its own sake is hardly the role of an economist.
I believe that in recent times Irish political parties have gone too far in their efforts to offend no interest group, a process that has encouraged growing contempt for politics and politicians.
Concern to avoid losing support from small groups of self-interested voters, each pursuing its own private interests, has come to preoccupy many politicians to the point of alienating the public from the political process.
A party that has the intelligence and the courage to abandon this approach, and to make it clear that in office it proposes to take on some of these interest groups, could attract considerable fresh support, especially from younger voters.
What many voters want to see are politicians nailing their colours to the mast on some issues instead of repeatedly evading their responsibility to offer vigorous reforming government in the public interest.
Finally, in a country that has been established to be one of the most unequal in Europe - perhaps the most unequal of all, at any rate in western Europe - for a party to aggravate this inequality simply to secure power, as David McWilliams has seemed to propose by advocating favouring better-off voters, would be difficult to defend.
In Fine Gael's case it would also be a distinctly odd way to prepare for partnership with Labour in government, to which Fine Gael is committed.