In the bad old days, statements likely to upset the political applecart were usually made by those of the wild and woolly left. Now, they're more likely to come from people whose middle-class credentials are impeccable but who are even more detached from reality than the left ever was.
Prof Brendan Walsh's warning to the Government about the need, as he sees it, to abandon its promise of tax cuts in the Budget is an example of detachment in practice. This is not to question his academic eminence or qualifications as an economist. But there's more to life than excellence either as a teacher or as an economist.
And only the most naive, or ideologically blinkered, politician would insist Prof Walsh's suggestion could be implemented without seriously affecting relations between the Government and the social partners; without blunting the opportunity to make ours a fairer society.
Prof Walsh is not the first or only authority to warn of inflationary pressures and the consequences of an overheating economy, as the jargon has it. The alarm was sounded last month by the European Commission and led to disagreements among Finance Ministers and between ministers and the Commission, most recently at the first Council meeting of the 11 states which will be the founders of the euro.
Prof Walsh, however, is better placed than most to recognise the impact of his proposals, should they be put into practice. It's hard to imagine anyone, other than a member of the Government or a leader in the worlds of finance and industry, whose views could have provoked such a reaction.
In his own words, he considers it inappropriate to fulfil the Government's promise of tax cuts. Less delicately: it's no longer Payback Time, as announced in the slogan promoting tax cuts for the better-off and support for a centre-right Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats coalition in last year's election.
Prof Walsh may not relish the thought or care for the description, but to renege on tax reductions in the Budget would be to break important commitments in Partnership 2000, to scupper the present agreement and to abandon any hope of negotiating another.
Prof Walsh is probably less interested in politics than in partnership: he's agin it, at any rate in the form it has taken in the four agreements negotiated by governments and social partners since 1988.
OR SO Peter Cassells insists. He believes that, like the peace process, the agreements represent, not so much a solution as the means to achieve it. And, like most politicians and many commentators, the general secretary of the ICTU is convinced the agreements have contributed largely to the wage moderation, industrial peace and air of consensual stability which have led to the economic successes of the last 10 years.
This is why politics - giving people what they've been promised, from a sense of justice and for fear of the consequences of reneging - is likely to prevail over strict economic orthodoxy.
Of course Prof Walsh's statements are heard by several economists and some admiring commentators with the reverence with which the truly faithful hear papal pronouncements - though, when you remember what some papal pronouncements have done for Catholicism, that may not be as complimentary as it sounds.
Still, when the professor advised the Government to reconsider tax cuts in the Budget - which, though he may not like the description, means reneging on a national agreement - he took all but a few of his colleagues by surprise.
One colleague, Moore McDowell, masquerading as a young fuddy duddy, made the even more surprising suggestion on Questions and Answers that the Government should not only tear up the agreement but withdraw from European monetary union as well. (To Moore McDowell's credit it must be added that he managed something Fianna Fail's advisers have been trying to do for years: he made Brian Cowen sound reasonable.)
No doubt applause rippled through the suited ranks of the Edward Burke Institute, the give-capitalism-a-chance club to which Mr McDowell belongs; it certainly reached the wilder shores of Today FM and the Sunday Independent.
On radio on Thursday, Eamon Dunphy and Shane Ross agreed (with each other) that joining EMU had been a craven act - as proved by Ireland's failure to have anyone appointed to the board of the new European Central Bank.
IT WAS not, they said, what the men of 1916 had fought and died for; though it's hard to imagine Connolly and Pearse cheering the Dunphy-Ross proposition that, when it came to EMU, we should have waited for Britain to join.
Nor do I see any prospect of a friendly hearing - never mind a soft landing - for those who favour a free-booting, deregulated economy, with minimum intervention by government and reductions in services all round, at a time like this.
More than a dozen tribunals and separate inquiries are examining the rubble left by freebooters who believe in the liberal use of brown paper bags and their technological equivalents to promote growth and profits. We've seen in the case of the admirable insurance ombudsman, Paulyn Marrinan-Quinn, how an independent agent's efforts to serve an industry and its customers may be frustrated by lack of funds and censorship, as Pat Rabbitte told the Dail.
It's not the first time an Ombudsman's Office has had to ward off attempts to strangle it, though in Michael Mills's experience the attacker was the government itself, led by Charles Haughey.
We've seen the present Government kick against every effort, first to set up tribunals. then to make them more effective. Ours is a society poorly equipped for debate, slow to question authority or to recognise there may be two, three or half-a-dozen different ways of looking at the same issue.
Economists are neither independent in the sense that an ombudsman is independent nor unanimous in the way that governments or parties pretend to be. Their judgments are open to question and are best debated, not only by other economists but by those who have less specialised and, it may be, wider interests.
Some economists may see themselves as the new hierarchy, above and beyond the concerns of most other citizens. One or two may have spoken ex cathedra when they were in the mood and the rest of us chose to acquiesce.
NCB, more optimistic than Brendan Walsh, boasted last week that we were on the way to joining the BMW economies of Europe. Frankly, most people probably couldn't give a damn.
What they want is a fairer deal all round.