The first thing to get clear about the Budget is the increase in child benefit won't be paid until next September.
This is normal - the increase announced in 1998 came into effect only three months ago. That is why you saw parents dancing for joy. But, given the hype which preceded this Budget, it is astonishing the new rate is not being paid earlier.
The increase is, as the Society of St Vincent de Paul said, "miserly" - £8 a month for each of the first two children, £10 for each subsequent child.
Child benefit is not just an instrument of IBEC's policy of getting the children out from under their mothers' feet so more women will stay at work and turn the children over to minders.
It is also of crucial importance to families living on social welfare and who we would all like to see rearing their children well.
The weekly child dependant allowance for these families was frozen (at rates ranging from £13.20 to £17) some years ago as part of a policy of replacing that weekly allowance with decent increases in Child Benefit.
So the rise in the monthly child benefit is usually the main increase they get.
Does £8 a month represent a decent increase for them? It means an extra 26p or 27p a day - enough for a packet of very plain crisps and a 10p bag, or, as Mr Michael Noonan told the Dail, enough for an extra packet of Pampers a month.
And, of course, they will wait until September for it.
Again, in the light of the hype, the £4 a week general increase in the personal rate of social welfare payments is miserable. Small wonder the Society of St Vincent de Paul was dismayed.
Carers, too, may well feel disappointment. What carers want is a dramatic easing of the means test or its abolition for the carer's allowance.
Neither of these things happened.
The introduction of a carer's benefit based on PRSI contributions is welcome.
It will enable a person at work to take a year off to care for an incapacitated person.
They will get £88.50 a week and their job will be preserved. The details of exactly when and how people will qualify for this have yet to be published.
It has to be said that £88.50 is a pittance compared to the huge savings each of these carers brings to the social services - compare it for instance, to the cost of more than £300 a week for a place in a nursing home and you begin to get an idea of the economic value of what carers do and of how little recognition they get for it.
Money spent on social welfare generally goes straight back into the economy.
Welfare recipients, after all, have little scope for saving, yet this fact is not really recognised by this Budget or by previous budgets.
For many years the most people on welfare could hope for was an increase in line with inflation.
Indeed, some readers will remember the howls from Fianna Fail when the Rainbow Coalition gave a 3 per cent increase in line with inflation.
But now the good times have come (unless you're old, sick, unemployed, working for peanuts, homeless, handicapped or have a millennium mortgage) and there is certainly no sign of Fianna Fail or its partner in Government spreading largesse around in the social welfare area.
Some good things have been done - an easing in how capital is assessed for non-contributory pensions, improvements in the treatment of the earnings of parttime workers whose spouses are on social welfare for instance - but where is the attack on poverty so many had anticipated?
One might blame some of that anticipation on the desperation of journalists to fill column inches (we do not expect our forecasts, no more than politicians expect their promises, to be thrown back at us later on).
But somebody fed and fuelled that anticipation and precious little was done to dampen it down.
So where is the attack on poverty?
Well, we do not know where it is, but we know it is not to be found in this Budget.