"There is no reason why Travellers, properly accommodated, should devalue property, but even if they did, are not people more important than property?" The stock answer to that remark, made by Victor Bewley in 1977, is: how would you like to have them living beside you?
But the stock answer did not work with Victor Bewley, who did have Travellers living at his home in Brittas for a time. It was the action of a man who, as a social reformer and philanthropist, said what he believed and put his beliefs into action.
Perhaps disillusionment was creeping in by the 1970s, though. In the interview with Paul Murray, then Social Services Correspondent of The Irish Times, in which he made that remark, he went on to say that, since the mid-1960s, "many different incidents" had driven him to the conclusion that there was a relationship between increasing affluence and objections to Travellers.
He had already publicly stated that Ireland was not a Christian society - and he was not a man for empty rhetoric - when he condemned the practice in some areas of allowing Travellers to stay only for as long as a child was being prepared for First Communion or Confirmation. "That is a terrible mockery: to say `We will prepare your children for the sacraments, then go away'; or `We will let you finish the school term. Then get lost!' "
It was, he said, a symptom of a growing evil, an indication of a materialistic society which put greater emphasis on property than on the value and dignity of each human being.
Yet, from today's vantage point, what he had seen in his early years - before materialism assumed the prominence it has today - was worse.
During the second World War, children died in the grindingly poor Dublin slums from coeliac disease, resulting from an imbalanced diet. At a public meeting in the Mansion House, called to address the problem, a plea went out for the loan of a premises where free meals could be cooked and given to children from poor families.
Victor Bewley, who died last week aged 87, stood up and - extraordinarily - offered the Westmoreland Street restaurant in the Bewley chain for use after normal hours (which at the time meant from early evening) for the purpose. The offer was taken up and that effort went on for four years, to the benefit of hundreds of children and their families.
The Ireland of the 1970s was almost certainly a better place to be in than the Ireland of the 1940s. But perhaps Bewley, who willingly embodied the Quaker tradition of philanthropy, was disappointed that growing affluence was more accompanied by a sense of "what we have we hold" than by any desire to give some of it away.
And it was in the treatment of Travellers that this was most apparent. There is no doubt that in the 1960s and 1970s Victor Bewley did an enormous amount of work to raise the issue of Travellers and their needs. He was a founder-member of the Dublin Committee for Travelling People, which pressed for accommodation in housing and halting sites for the city and county's Travellers.
For a time he advised the Minister for Local Government on the programme of settlement and he was chairman of the National Council for Travelling People. But progress was excruciatingly slow and time and again he saw initiatives to accommodate Travellers fail because of local opposition.
There was also concern at the time at the number of Traveller children on the streets of Dublin, some of whom were sleeping rough. It was through the Dublin Committee that Trudder House in Co Wicklow was established as a residential centre for some of these children - where, tragically, some staff sexually abused many of them. Fortunately, Bewley was no enthusiast for taking children into care. Putting a child into compulsory care could lead to more problems, both in the institution and when the child came out, he told The Irish Times in 1982.
Quite a number of parents of children on Dublin streets had themselves been in care, he said.
The Dublin Committee also provided a day service for children with family problems.
Bewley was concerned at what he saw as a dehumanising of society as material values grew more dominant. "We are making life more impersonal", he said at a lecture sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends, "and the individual counts for less and less. Man must serve the needs of the economic system he has created rather than the reverse."
It is ironic that it is only in the last few years that the phrase "Do we want to live in a society or in an economy?" has come to be used in discussions about where we are going. His lecture, in which he posed the same question, was delivered this month 24 years ago.
Despite his pessimism of the 1970s, it seems fair to say that there is now, again, a growing concern with social justice and divisions in society.
Victor Bewley, who left the world better than he found it, played an important part in raising social awareness in Ireland. Perhaps we are now starting to catch up.