In retrospect, the 19th and 20th centuries can be seen to have been a unique period of ideological turmoil, extending from the French Revolution to the triumph of capitalism in the 1980s.
We are all aware of the huge revolution in international affairs brought about by the ending of the Cold War, in particular the disappearance of the nuclear tensions that overshadowed the world from 1945 to 1990.
What we have yet to come to terms with is the impact upon politics of the virtual disappearance of ideological conflict between individualist capitalism and collectivist socialism.
In Ireland we had been protected from many of the tensions of that conflict by the diversion of our political energies, first of all into a struggle for national independence, and subsequently into a futile domestic conflict over the pace of the process of removing monarchical forms from the Constitution of our newly-independent State.
Nevertheless, the swing to the right in the 1980s and the subsequent triumph of capitalism have had visible effects upon the working of our political system. For, together with the short-term impact of the retrenchment forced upon us by the financial crisis of the early 1980s, these developments effectively halted the process of redistribution between haves and have-nots in our society which had been quietly proceeding throughout the first two decades of our post-1950s economic recovery.
I say "quietly proceeding" because the most striking feature of that belated process of social reform, carried forward by successive governments in the 1960s and 1970s, is the fact that neither then nor since has its scale been grasped or understood by public opinion in Ireland.
Most people are, I think, quite unaware of what was achieved during those years of unrecognised social democracy in Ireland, and very few are fully aware of the extent to which the period since the early 1980s has been one of what might be called social stagnation in terms of income redistribution through the budgetary system.
Let me recall the facts of what happened between 1960 and the early 1980s. During this initial period of economic growth the pre-tax purchasing power of earned incomes doubled, but, because the burden of taxation was rising, after-tax incomes increased by a somewhat smaller amount. What were these increased taxes being used for?
Largely to improve significantly the ratio between earned incomes and social benefits, the gap which between had been huge up to the end of the 1950s. The old age pension in 1959 was less than one fifth of the average industrial wage.
While the purchasing power of after tax earned incomes rose by a good deal less than half during this period of just under a quarter of a century, the purchasing power of social benefits trebled.
That was a very quiet social revolution; no fuss was made about it. Both politicians and people took it as a matter of course that as the country finally became more prosperous, the benefits of that prosperity should be shared by means of redistribution to the disadvantaged in our community, the pensioners, widows, disabled and unemployed, and in the 1970s also to hitherto ignored groups such as prisoners' wives and single mothers.
If taxes had to rise to accommodate these social measures, that was then accepted without much demur: after all, out of our rising real incomes it was seen as only right that we should spare something for the disadvantaged.
It was in fact only in 1975, in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, that resentment against higher taxes first began to emerge; not among the middle classes, who had shown a strong sense of social justice throughout this period, but in the form of a trade union-organised anti-tax march.
Even in the initial stages of the financial crisis of the early 1980s, this momentum of social redistribution was maintained.
My government's 1982 budget (which, although defeated in the Dail, thus leading to a temporary change of government, was effectively re-enacted by Fianna Fail in March of that year) increased social provisions by 25 per cent. Over the following 12 months, this provided those depending on social benefits with an 8 per cent boost in their purchasing power, at a time when the purchasing power of earned incomes was starting to fall because at that point prices were rising faster than pay.
During the immediately following years of financial crisis, it was not possible to effect further transfers of real incomes, but the purchasing power of social benefits was maintained.
But the process of social redistribution stopped there. For, when economic growth resumed in the late 1980s, a new spirit of selfish materialism had crept in from the outside world, as Thatcherism and Reagonomics took hold. Not only were pensions, disability benefits etc no longer increased faster than earned incomes, as had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s, they were in fact deliberately held down to less than the increase in such incomes. Consequently, as the rest of the population became much better off during the 1990s, those on social welfare had their living standards held at the level of the early 1980s.
It IS only in the last couple of years that the Government has belatedly taken steps to improve the lot of the disadvantaged in our society, but even today the ratio of social payments to earned incomes is no better than it was 20 years ago, in marked contrast to what had happened in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, I doubt if many of our politicians are really conscious of the counterrevolution in social policy for which our political system has been responsible over the last 20 years. Most have probably been unconscious agents of a global shift from the social democratic atmosphere of the period before 1980 to the selfish materialism of the past two decades.
The right-wing mantra of keeping down spending and cutting taxes, largely echoed by much of the media (as in the "Payback Time" editorial in the Irish Independent before the 1997 election), has so largely infiltrated the consciousness of our political class that they are almost totally unconscious of how far to the right our system has swung since the 1970s.
Can this be changed? Can we hope to see a revival of the social consciousness which underlay the thinking of Irish politicians of all parties 40, 30, even 20 years ago?
I think we can see signs of this happening in the recent past, and the way issues are debated at the time of next election will indicate the extent to which our politics can recover the vitality and social purpose of former times.