John Lonergan is such a good man that one would almost like to be locked up in Mountjoy so as to come under the influence of whatever it is prison governors do. I took part in a debate with him last year on literacy and, like all present, was transfixed by his clarity and anger.
When he had finished, someone asked if he had considered running for president. It was clear from the applause that everyone had been thinking the same thing.
I see he has been weaving his spell again, at a recent conference entitled "Our Society in the New Millennium" in Co Clare, at which he described modern Ireland as "soulless and heartless" and warned that we were fast becoming a "most intolerant and self-righteous people".
We needed, he said, to envisage a society for the new millennium in which people's rights were balanced alongside their responsibilities. He emphasised family. "The importance of the family unit in Irish society contributed enormously to the quality of life of past generations", he observed. "The traditional family was the cornerstone of society. Individually, we have become self-centred and selfish. We measure our time in money terms".
Mr Lonergan spoke, too, of the increasing pressure on young people who, attempting to set up home together, have to mortgage their futures to have a roof. He spoke of the "phenomenal growth" of the nursing home industry, "where many elderly people spend the last years of their lives walking around aimlessly, staring at televisions or ceilings. Is this what we must look forward to at the end of our lives?"
A lazy eye might read Mr Lonergan's comments as the worthy but platitudinous lamentations of a do-gooder. But this urgent wake-up call was precisely couched. John Lonergan has, in these few remarks, summarised the problem and touched on its profound nature. This man, whose work on our behalf calls on him to stand at the edge of our society, has observed with close attention the process of cause-and-effect at work in our collective lives, and is shouting "Stop!"
There is a danger that, because his words resemble words we have heard before, we will not see in his observations the clarity of their message. His remarks about the importance of family, for example, might be misread as the repetition of a well-worn conservative mantra.
But, as is now happening in Britain, we need to reconsider these ideas in a different light. There need not be a conflict between embracing difference and diversity and the issue of whether we should dismantle our guiding norms just because some of us are unable to adhere to them.
It would also be a mistake to interpret Mr Lonergan's remarks as an attack on the better-off. What he was saying was that we are on the verge of losing some things we have been unaware of or had forgotten about, but which cannot be replaced or managed without. In the self-congratulatory era of the Celtic Tiger, the shiny new things we are being offered do not come without a price; he was reminding us that the price is being paid all the time in currencies we are unable to recognise.
I had a long conversation last week with a friend who is on a visit here from her native Greece. I have never been to Greece and know little about it other than what I learned in school about its ancient civilisation and what I have picked up from commentaries about its economic status within the European Union.
In this latter connection, Greece has filled a particular role for this country: that of being worse off than we are. Greece is the country whose economic fundamentals allow our cups to flow over with condescension, the only economy in the EU more in need of subventions than our own.
But the reality of life in Greece sounds somewhat different from what might be gathered from such fleeting impressions. My friend described to me a society in which concepts of democracy have taken root in the hearts of the people; where ownership of the society is held, and seen to be held, by citizens rather than state.
She described a society in which the priority is living human lives rather than serving the economy. She told me, for example, of how at present she is planning her marriage to a man who has two children, whom the couple will bring up as their own. Recently a social worker came around to check her out and, on seeing that her house was not big enough for a married couple and two children, immediately offered her a loan at 4 per cent interest to build a new house.
She told me that in Greece the law seeks to protect families and children, but in doing so does not treat one parent differently from the other. In Greece, she said, there is a knowledge buried deep in the people that there are more important things than money. She told me of how Greek working life is structured to allow people to spend time with their families. You can start work early in the morning and finish in the afternoon. Lunch breaks are two hours to allow people to go home and eat with their children.
People are encouraged and enabled to have their elderly family members come and live with them; anyone who put their parents in a home would be shunned by the community. In Greece there is no such thing as homelessness, and until recently crime levels were negligible. You could sleep at night with the windows open, or walk down the street at any time of the day or night.
All this in a country we would regard as being less well-off than we are.
My friend also had some interesting observations about Ireland, which she has been visiting for many years. The most noticeable things about us, she said, was our fear. She is right. We are afraid of everything now: of the State, of the media, of the future, of the banks, of old age, of economic insecurity, of losing our children, of having our cars clamped.
And the reason we are afraid, fundamentally, is that we have no faith in anything except money; and, never having enough of this commodity, we have no protection from the abyss of terror which we sense at every step. Our culture has separated out the strands of public thought so that one strand, the strand of economism, has become the primary - increasingly the only - artery of public thought.
What has happened to us is that everything is being turned into money, and we ourselves into the subjects of money, each of us isolated, detached, sundered from the rest of human kind.
The culture in which we grew up, in which the things we needed to live good lives - fresh air, peace of mind, a home, security and a host of other things - were either free of charge or relatively inexpensive. Soon the world will offer us nothing except what we can pay for. In such a society, we should hardly be surprised when people who are strangled with economic obligations decide that, having paid their own way, they have no further responsibility to their fellow citizens.