It's a savage irony that we should mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a miserly squabble about money.
Worse: it's a squabble about reducing the level of our aid to the poorest of the world's poor because our economy has been doing so well.
Liz O'Donnell, who has threatened to resign her ministerial post on the issue, used a threadbare cliche to describe it to the Dail. She called it a problem of prosperity.
It's not. It's a problem of barely credible meanness and indifference; a shabby, shameful crux for a republic which once prided itself as a leader among post-colonial nations.
We were in a poorer, but more honourable, state when we joined other developed countries in a commitment to the target set by the United Nations for official aid to what was then known as the Third World.
That was in 1970. We had lately signed the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Area Agreement. We had yet to join the Common Market. If anyone had suggested that we might one day rank with the richest - and meanest - in the world, they'd have been trampled in the rush to see the blue moon.
The UN target was 0.7 per cent of the donor's Gross National Product. Not an outlandish demand, given the needs of the poor and the gap between poor and rich. We've never come within an ass's roar of that target.
For six years we've crawled towards the halfway mark. Last year we managed 0.31 per cent of GNP or £122 million. The Government's aim is to reach 0.45 per cent by 2002.
But, as Liz O'Donnell told Gay Mitchell, Dick Spring and Proinsias De Rossa in the Dail, if the Estimate for aid remains unchanged, Ireland's contribution will be £137 million or 0.29 per cent in 1999 - not 0.32 per cent, as planned.
She'd written to the Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach, she told Sean O'Rourke on RTE radio. "I have stated in plain language that our present level of aid is unsatisfactory," she told the Dail.
On radio she said that she hadn't ruled out resigning on the issue; in the Dail, Mr Spring encouraged her to convince her colleagues that the State should meet its international commitments.
If Liz O'Donnell resigns, she will be the first minister since Frank Cluskey in the 1980s to have quit in support of a principle. Even if she doesn't, she will have drawn attention to yet another example of the triumph of hypocrisy over experience.
Few enough families in this country have escaped hunger, deprivation or exile. We should sympathise with people suffering the same fate who turn to us for help.
We should, but we don't.
Our laws insist that those who come here must not work. When they obey the law, we blame them for depending on welfare. Some say the money would be better spent on our own poor.
They don't mean it.
The ESRI suggested last week that we spend more on welfare. It was accused of "mindless prattle" by no less an authority than the chairman of the group set up to advise the Government on financial regulation.
There's a true tribune of the people and guardian of the public interest, comforter of the comfortable, the thinking man's Ivor Callely - Michael McDowell.
What the opponents of immigration really want is that anyone who feels tempted to come here should be encouraged to stay at home. If that doesn't work and immigrants arrive anyway, they should be sent back.
These are not the problems of prosperity. They are problems of bigotry and racism.
An outsider might have thought we were a generous people. And we are, proved so by the heroic work of thousands of volunteers, supported by funds to which tens of thousands contribute year in, year out.
To criticise this or other governments for failing to match such generosity is not to indulge in self-flagellation, as the hard chaws who snarl at the so-called poverty industry would have you believe.
The responsibility for official meanness and indifference in this instance lies not with the people, but with those who devised and passed the Estimates, those who chose to reduce or ignore the importance of overseas aid.
Some argue that we should look, not at the percentages, but at the cash value of the contributions.
But setting the target as a percentage of GNP in the first place made sense for obvious reasons: to take account of fluctuating fortunes in the donor states and to compare the performances of one donor state with another.
Defensive politicians and their media allies also urge the rest of us to keep things in perspective, to come down to earth and remember how life is in the real world.
In that case, they should be reminded that the £137 million currently set as Ireland's contribution to overseas aid falls far short of the cost of fraud in the beef industry.
Political cronyism and official connivance cost this State £70 million at one stroke and may cost us another £200 million before the dust settles on one of the sleaziest affairs in a period of unprecedented sleaze.
But the conniving politicians and officials of the late 1980s and early 1990s brazened it out. And their successors don't want to hear of it when the subject is raised by Des O'Malley or Pat Rabbitte.
No doubt they expect the law's delay and complex argument will fool the public into believing that the problems of prosperity being investigated by Mr Justice Moriarty, Mr Justice Flood and a dozen other adjudicators have gone away as well.
In the meantime, the Government is engaged in another remarkable exercise, campaigning for a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.
It's remarkable because anyone engaged in such a campaign might be expected to ensure that its own house was in order, its record sound, its standing in the international community at least as respectable as its peers and potential competitors.
There's no doubt about our solid contribution to peacekeeping. But can we any longer claim to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries?
Can a country which has the highest current and predicted growth levels in the European Union but the poorest record in overseas aid look other UN members in the eye as it canvasses support?
In some broadcast discussions among commentators, the issue has been reduced to a minor theme in a wider debate about Mary Harney's leadership or the future of the Progressive Democrats.
I think it's about two things: our role in an impoverished world and national self-respect.