In his Irish Times column he has returned again and again to certain themes, for example, the deficiencies in our care of the longterm mentally ill. A column, however, is nothing but a small number of words. It can jeer or goad or tell a memorable anecdote, but it isn't much good at analysis. And readers know, I think, when a subject is just too complex for a column, and if it makes them uncomfortable they take the opportunity to shy away from a response.

So I wonder how he'll fare with mobilising support for something really big.

Recently he took on life and death. He talked about the inequalities in mortalities in Ireland "that arise not just from inequalities in healthcare but from a broader base of inequality in society, in housing, education, income, wealth, power influence and environmental inequalities". He repeated the statistics that show that the disadvantaged in our society are much more vulnerable to illness and suffering, and die much sooner than the rest of us. We, the privileged, have grabbed for ourselves the much bigger share of the only really precious thing . . . life itself.

"My point was, " he added in a later column, "that the scale of such inequalities is not addressed by the major parties, including the Labour Partyf and to urge that the scale of inequality become a central issue in the election campaign."

The media, he said, have a central role in making it an issue. A reader wrote in to say that since Vincent Browne writes columns in two papers, edits a magazine and has an RTE show, he surely has more of the media at his command than most. So he has. But he's a voice crying in the wilderness compared to the influence of, say, the Sunday Independent, whose old-fashioned sensationalism barely disguises an abject worship of wealth and the wealthy. It peddles a version of the good life in which a social conscience, to put it mildly, doesn't figure. It is an influential version because, even if many people wish that Ireland were a more equitable place, they can't imagine . . . and the Sunday Independent isn't going to help them . . . how to go about achieving equity without giving up some of their own assets and privileges. And they don't want to do that. And they don't want to be made feel guilty about not doing it, either.

Even within the responsible media there isn't, I'd guess, much of a hunger for doing what Vincent Browne wants . . . that is, to scrutinise and cross-examine candidates in the next general election about the practical details of their commitment to alleviating gross social inequality. Browne is right when he focuses on the election . . . social reform will certainly not come about without policies enshrined in legislation. But the parties themselves show no signs of believing that a commitment to social justice adds to their electability. Quite the reverse: various otherwise unremarkable backbenchers attract votes by making Le Pen-type noises.

The media is where he lives, so Vincent Browne starts from there. But our lack of care for each other goes back to an educational system that does nothing to teach us what forces shape our individual lives within a society . . .

an education that respects no ideology except religion. It goes back to what we were taught about what we owe to other people. And in Ireland, the Catholic church belies anything it might preach about loving one another by its promotion of the interests of one group only . . . middleclass men in pursuit of money and power . . . through its snob Catholic schools, such as the one that, as it happens, Vincent Browne went to.

So alienated are we from any vital idea of community that what moral fervour survives here goes into the private lives of exemplary altruism, or into environmental concerns, or into anti-war protests, or into actions around Chernobyl, or African hunger, or preventing Aids. These are, of course, more pressing than any problem of ours. Nevertheless here, right here, babies are born in districts of every city and town and on the side of roads every single day who we know will lead lives doomed to stupidity and squalor and will have early deaths, unless a miracle intervenes. They'll have less of everything, including life, than the rest of us, not because they are born any less perfect but because our system makes them imperfect. I admire Vincent Browne for using the words at his command to try to make a difference. But the words themselves disguise the size of the mountain of injustice bearing down on the people at the bottom, and it is almost impossible to imagine it dislodged.