It's the absence of shame that's most shameful. Richer per head than all other EU countries except tiny Luxembourg, the Republic has the second-highest concentration of poverty among the world's developed states. As the IDA spouts commercially functional clusters of clichΘs about "high value development in a world-class arena", creating an "ambience conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship" and developing "clusters of excellence", nearly a quarter of the population is functionally illiterate.
Given such IDA guff, you might reasonably argue that difficulties with literacy are not clustered only among the poor. Then again, in a "world-class arena" defined by business interests, our industry seducers are obviously spouting industrial-strength, indeed even world-class, business-ese. Human language - language that treats people as people, not as cogs in an economic machine - is dying. Accountants rule. Even RT╔, which, properly financed and managed, could be the country's most accessible and influential cluster of culture, is being demolished.
In a month in which reports have shown an obscene disparity between the rich and poor in a country intent on concocting "clusters of excellence", the destruction of RT╔ fits perfectly with the ruling verbal and economic barbarism. Clearly, structures that we had in the past are being consumed by the consumption frenzy of the economy in which we live. Intimate institutions, such as the family, and public ones (political parties, the media, even the State itself) are fragmenting.
What we are living through is no mere shake-up, however. Fair enough, traditional families, political parties and the media have always had their shadow sides. They too must change over time. But their traditional forms and roles are not being replaced by some sort of lively if debatable pragmatism primarily delivering "efficiency". The changes are far greater than that, with clusters of cute hoors becoming fabulously wealthy as most people - employees in particular - work harder and harder for a fraction of the gains.
Consider the Orwellian title of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF). Sure, many people have become more prosperous in the last decade. But fairness? We have the second worst record in the developed world, deprived of last place only by the US, the engine of global capitalism.
With such fairness, you are, as guests at ambassadorial shindigs allegedly say, spoiling us, lads. Quite simply, in a culture of the "bottom line", Ireland's bottom line, as the UN report shows, is a shame, a bloody shame.
How about this for a bottom line? In the US. These are the ratios of a feudal world and we are being led in a similar direction. You might or might not sigh a weary "fair play" to punters who can pull off such a trick. But there's no possible moral justification for such shameless disparity, brazenly sold as "fairness".
Yet the gap will continue to grow, ensuring that we sell hard-won civilisation for cash. Problem is, despite the current wealth, Irish health, education and even television are barbarously underfunded. We live not merely in propagandised populist times - which, of course, have pros and cons - but in a period of profound vulgarity.
To say so inevitably invites accusations of sniffiness, snobbery and begrudgery. Well, that's the way. But not to say so offers succour to the shysters who take us all for world-class suckers. The UN bottom line shows that Ireland is now rich, sick and increasingly ignorant.
Anyway ... RT╔. Who hasn't got legitimate resentments against an outfit which so loved Section 31; has inflicted on us overpaid "personalities", even though we paid to have presenters; has too often behaved with insulting arrogance and produced portentous clowns, clearly delighted to believe Seβn Lemass's remark that state TV is fundamentally an arm of government? And yet, for all that and more, S∅le de Valera's attempt to cripple our already ailing State television is more despicable than anything - yes, even the recent Des O'Malley hagiography - that RT╔ has ever done.
Think about it. You drive home on jammed roads from your cluster of excellence or, after an hour's wait, get a bus from your fairness-enhancing, minimum-wage job to find clusters of cheap imported rubbish on telly. OK, so a little cheap imported rubbish can be entertaining, but Irish television offering one giant cluster of cheap imported rubbish (like US TV only, instead of importing it, they make and export it for profit) is a sad spectacle. That, in the most populist cultural terms, is part of the price of what our rulers call "prosperity".
That £14.50 TV licence fee increase (don't you love the 50p bit, representing the rigour and accuracy of accounting?) has, of course, been rigorously and accurately derived from a report by an accountancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, rigorous and accurate calibrators of culture that they are. RT╔ must now, in the words of a spokesman for S∅le de Valera, "get its house in order" before the Cabinet will consider accelerating any further increase. Furthermore, costs must be cut, redundancies implemented and a business plan prepared.
All right, so RT╔'s "house" is not "in order". But what of the Government's "house"? How "in order" does the UN report suggest that is? Really, there is a shameless brazenness about Government guff in relation to RT╔. Just consider what's being said: we'll preside over clusters of deprivation which give the State the second-highest concentration of poverty in the developed world while ordering other people to get their houses in order. "Orwellian" probably isn't strong enough to describe such crassness.
In terms of television then, "Boston or Berlin" translates as "BBC or the Fox Channel". Not that most people will even be likely to hear such an argument - whatever you think of it - as the Fox mentality becomes pervasive. On Irish television, clusters of claptrap may well prevail to the point that clusters of censorship did for two decades. Meanwhile, great new "entrepreneurs" - punters who buy State assets cheaply and sell for huge profits - will emerge to keep all our houses in order. Oh dear!
Abject prostration before "the market" has led us to this. In civilised societies, the market is used as a valuable and dynamic economic tool, eminently suitable for delivering certain goods and services and utterly unsuitable for others. Is it now unreconstructed commie thinking to question why some people should have hundreds of millions of pounds while more than three in every 20 live in poverty and deprivation and many live in pain and even die for lack of medical care? Has the fundamentalism bitten so deeply? Ambition and success are fine and worthy and among the qualities which make life worth living for most people. But a system which produces such obscene inequalities - even allowing for its periodic dynamism - is less than civilised. Apologists may argue that Ireland is a better country than it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. And sure, fair enough, there have been very considerable improvements which ought not to be dismissed. But the cost of these gains is not measurable by all the accountants in the world.
Such costs include a coarsening in society, a breakdown in community, frenetic consumption, the destruction of compassion, the lessening of civility and increased selfishness (just to survive). It depends on your perspective, of course, but even language gets dislocated when the rate of change has been as dramatic as in Ireland. "Independence", "self-reliance" , "a go-ahead mentality" . . . such are the terms promoted to describe the changes in human activity and human relations which have been generated by the Tiger economy.
And yes, these traits are a part of the story. But only as a part. As traditional Irish values cast shadows, so too do the newer ones. Even hypocrisy, arguably the darkest shadow of the old ways, persists. There isn't for instance, much government talk about independence or self-reliance when it comes to PAYE employees paying taxes. And so it goes.
The UN, IDA and PricewaterhouseCoopers reports this month make it impossible not to think that we now have a ruling class which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Little wonder there's no shame. There's not even much straight talking in human language any more. All sane people have long since realised that the Tiger economy has disproportionately benefited the wealthy. Not all will have known just how obscene has been the disproportion. If we keep going, maybe we'll reach a stage in which half the population is illiterate while the other half prepares detailed business plans around clusters of cliches, designed to keep the house in order.