In the wake of the Budget and recent offshore scandals, a consensus diagnosis has taken hold of our public debate. It runs something like this.

"We are a vile and hypocritical society. Selfishness and greed rule. The Budget's tax reductions proved as much. We don't just tolerate inequality in our economic boom, we revel in it. We don't care about poverty. No one cares about the bottom-of-the-heap heroin addicts, only middle-class ecstasy users. The recently revealed offshore scandals show that ingrained dishonesty accompanies selfishness and greed. Politics serves these masters only. A bottomless pit of cynicism is the only place from which to observe the country."

This conventional view is heard especially when the words "tax", "the PDs" or "Charlie McCreevy" are uttered.

This consensus insists that you cannot claim to be concerned about, and willing to do something about, poverty, unemployment and heroin addiction, if you favour reductions in tax rates. It's as if the test of social concern is a particular marginal rate of tax, which must of course be more than 50 per cent. You cannot profess a true interest in social policy unless you believe that the present social welfare budget must be increased. You cannot be interested in improvements in education or health care if you believe in limiting public expenditure. You are not sound on the national question of equality if you are prepared to tolerate that some people will earn and accumulate more money than others. You are a mere Uncle Tom to the interests of the rich if you say it is not correct to look at taxation as simply dividing the cake, so that more for one means less for another.

You must be a lackey if you find anything to do with making capital gains defensible. Most of all: if you earn anything above the average industrial wage; if you look forward to April's tax cuts; if you want to keep more than 50p of your next earned £1, thou shalt feel guilty.

The only way to prove you are not greedy when you get the tax cuts is to vote to reverse them, to impose a higher tax burden on yourself. Giving the extra to charity won't do, since that only shows you may be decent, but doesn't prove that society is.

These are the impressions I get from a lot of the analysis, not alone in fully-worked editorials (such as in the current edition of Magill magazine, titled "On the Take") and other written pieces, but in countless unscripted remarks from the usual invited guests on radio and television. This consensus should be resisted strongly. We must insist that it is possible to disagree with it entirely and be equally committed to social justice. There must be room to hold that redistribution of income is not the main goal of social policy.

Some very simple things deserve to be said again if only to counter the limiting consensus. The challenge facing Ireland and Europe is to marry enterprise and social protection. We need wealth. There is no point in talking about social inclusion if there is nothing substantial to be included into. Growth does not solve everything but no growth makes everything worse.

We need indigenous businesses which survive and grow, and multinationals which become as rooted here as possible. This means that we must not just tolerate, but even welcome, some people (crucially, people other than you and I) becoming wealthy and low tax rates.

Some of us who care about social inclusion do not feel obliged to seek increased taxes. Increased taxes are required only where all public expenditure programmes must be maintained as they are, where it is assumed that improvement always requires more money, and where there is no growth in government revenues. Each of these conditions is questionable, and in the case of static revenues, already undermined by the facts.

There is an alternative to the woebegone consensus. It is not very well articulated in public, even if it informs present government policy. It needs a confident, intelligent, dare I say, caring voice. Who will be its champion?

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist.