`Of course," said Brendan Butler of IBEC, the employers' organisation, "of course, the gap between rich and poor has increased in the last 15 years - but that's inevitable."
Mary Murphy of the St Vincent de Paul Society couldn't have disagreed more. With Anna Lee of the Combat Poverty Agency, she and Brendan Butler were discussing the agency's publication, Rich and Poor, Perspectives on Tackling Inequality in Ireland on RTE Radio's After Dark.
It was not an accident, Mary Murphy argued, that in 15 years in which Ireland's economic progress had been undoubted, inequality had wrought ugly changes in Irish society. It was a choice deliberately made.
The example she gave was well timed: we failed to have enough houses built but, come what may, Bertie Ahern's Stadium Ireland would get going: "It's not an accident, it's a question of will." It was a coincidence that a headline in the Irish Examiner had highlighted Mary Harney's concern about the stadium project on the day on which Sister Stanislaus Kennedy launched the book, which showed that Ireland's disposable incomes are among the most unequal in the developed world.
Why this had happened was clear: "Income tax reductions since 1987 have mainly reduced tax rates and have disproportionately benefited the better-off. Substantial reductions in taxes on profits, capital gains and property transfers favour the accumulation and concentration of capital.
"The absence of any property or wealth tax, the halving of capital gains tax and the erosion of capital acquisitions tax leave Ireland with one of the most lenient capital tax regimes in Europe."
This kind of stuff was unlikely to be headlined next day or to be given more than dutiful coverage in main news bulletins, although the bitter consequences of such policies have been in the news of late. Last weekend, we heard in detail about the blatantly discriminatory health services - not from a crowd of agitators and malcontents but from the Irish Medical Organisation, whose members experience the system's deficiencies day after day.
A report from the construction industry about a further decline in house building - on this occasion by 15 per cent in early 2001 - is followed by accounts of some young people desperately seeking help to secure mortgages.
There are constant reports of increasing homelessness. On Tuesday, a study of adult education disadvantage on both sides of the Border was reported to have found that the education systems North and South are still not reaching over one million adults who left school with little or no qualifications.
But a two-tier health system, disillusion in the public service, lack of housing and the presence of one million adults who have literacy problems are far removed from populist attitudes to taxes and the overblown ambition of Bertie Ahern. It was, as you know, the satirist Juvenal who complained that Rome's ambitions had been reduced to bread and circuses. Ahern is the man for bread and circuses - or savings schemes for the rich and a stadium for every audience - in our time.
Even Mary Harney was surprised by the abandon with which he was prepared to spend public funds. His thinking, as explained by Pat Kenny on his radio programme, was that - since the country was awash with money and we may not always be so lucky - if Stadium Ireland wasn't built now it would never be built. But this is just the argument that's used by those who see more clearly than Ahern does what a lop-sided society this is and make the case that if the opportunity to change it isn't taken now, it may be lost.
Still, it would be unfair to both the claims of sport and the urgent need to make this a fairer society if the issue were to be reduced to a choice between sport and fair play. Michael Noonan takes the point. He believes that Ahern's is the wrong project, in the wrong place, at the wrong time and promises that, as Taoiseach, he'd put a stop to it. Our wealth, he says, should be spent on health, housing and education - and on improving sports facilities around the State.
Pat Rabbitte, whose carefully argued opposition to the Ahern project was at first dismissed as jealousy because the FAI's alternative Eircom Park would have been in his constituency, now finds himself with considerable support. He and Sean Barrett, who follows sports and right-wing economics with the same enthusiasm, share doubts about the need for a stadium in the first place. But they're not the only odd fellows in a widening alliance.
Mary Harney agrees with Ruairi Quinn's demand that contracts shouldn't be signed until independent consultants have assessed the cost of the project. But we will have to wait until the middle of next week before we know how seriously to take the Tanaiste's concerns and how effective public criticism has been.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie