Ireland's booming economy has led to a breakdown of traditional values and a more unequal society, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte claimed today.
Mr Rabbitte accused the Government of allowing the gap between the haves and have-nots to widen despite record public finances.
"There is a deeper sense of unease that sits beneath the surface of our national life," he told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Co Donegal today.
"What we are talking about here is a breakdown in patterns of mutual respect and social order which people of my generation grew up taking for granted."
Mr Rabbitte said the quality of life of citizens had been hampered in recent years by antisocial behaviour, traffic congestion, property prices, a lack of childcare and an ailing health service.
Several politicians, academics and church leaders have addressed the week-long MacGill Summer School, which celebrates the life of Donegal writer Patrick MacGill, who died in 1963.
Mr Rabbitte said that if politicians believed inequality was necessary "to make the system work," then we shouldn't be surprised if we end up with an unequal society.
"Why, despite all our wealth, do we not have an adequate health service?
"Why do young families have to turn themselves inside out to juggle the demands of home and work, and end up paying more for childcare than for a mortgage?
"Why do people living in and around Dublin and other cities spend too much of their lives in traffic jams, when other European countries have managed to construct decent transport systems? Why do one in seven of our children live in the type of poverty that means being deprived of decent food and living conditions?"
He urged people not to abandon the community-based values of the past. "If we were to proceed over the next 25 years to abandon the values of the past - community, fraternity - at the same rate as we have abandoned them over the past five or 10 years, we are destined to aggravate the divisions and create an ever more unfair society."
"We need an open, liberal and tolerant society, built on a foundation of personal freedom, and of course we need a vibrant democracy.
"As a small and extremely open economy, we simply cannot afford to fall behind, as we have done, in areas such as broadband, not more than we can afford to spend years dithering about airport terminals."
He said equality in society should be viewed as an economic virtue rather than a vice.