In layman's terms, they mean that every fifth person you meet in the street, in a crowded bus or a shop is poor, deprived of their dignity and left helpless by the society. At these rates, poverty should be turning our cities into shanty towns.

Apparently, only the heroic efforts of the Garda Siochana are holding back the tide of discontent that is about to sweep across our country, for Cori claims relative poverty has been growing in Ireland since the 1990s.

Yet, says Cori, there is a solution . . . the Irish state must increase spending on 'social protection'. To do so, taxpayers must accept higher taxes.

We have heard all of this before. With a quarterly regularity, the wellintentioned folks of Cori produce voluminous tomes on the alleged ailments of Ireland. Every time the social partners sit down for a new round of 'talks' on how to divide taxpayers' money, Cori is there with green papers, pamphlets and policy proposals.

However, as of late, Cori's message has been slowly creeping into our politics.

Last year, Cori's Fr Sean Healy led the Fianna Fail think-in with a moving speech about the evils of wealth and the need for taxing the rich to improve the lot of the poor. Following this, Budget 2006 abolished several tax incentives. A week ago, housing minister Noel Ahern signalled that the government may be considering a proposal to tax land speculators, something that Cori has been calling for over the years. The prospect of the government going into the next elections suggests that we should pay closer attention to Cori's claims.

First, let us look at the central claims concerning poverty in Ireland. The Cori report looks exclusively at relative poverty, which assumes that any person earning below 60% of the median self-reported income in the country is poor. Using CSO data, Cori defines a relatively poor person in Ireland as anyone living on less than 203.55 per week.

Although this number sounds extremely low, what Cori is not telling us is that it means next to nothing in terms of actual earnings or dignity of those whom Cori defines as being poor.

First, any person would hardly compare herself to a median earner. Even in envy, people assess their wellbeing by reference to their own peers. This means that taking 60% of the total population median and applying this to a narrowly defined subset of the population, Cori commits a fallacy of comparing apples and oranges. Will a single person earning, say, 30,000 a year have her dignity diminished by living in the same country as someone earning 50,000 a year?

Highly unlikely. Yet, by using the measure of relative poverty relying on the concept of "dignity", Cori seems to think so.

Second, in looking at the median income, Cori conveniently omits the fact that most of the Irish shadow economy earnings are unreported in income surveys and accrue predominantly to those outside the employment pool. According to the OECD, our shadow economy is 18.8% of GNP. Assuming that earnings in the grey sectors are distributed similarly to those in the official economy adds some 4,000 per poor person in unreported annual income.

This may explain why officially measured risk of poverty is much higher amongst unemployed males . . . those who are most likely to be engaged in cash work.

It also explains in part why there is higher risk of poverty in rural areas . . .

many agricultural jobs are seasonal and cash-based.

Third, social assistance computed by Cori excludes non-monetary benefits that are paid on top of welfare assistance to the poor, such as subsidised or free housing and healthcare. Taking all social welfare spending programmes, dividing this across all of Ireland's nonworking population, our state subsidies conservatively amount to 8,000 per 'poor' person per annum.

Combining this with Cori figures, a single person labelled by Cori as poor may be earning around 22,000 a year, or over 50,000 a year for a family of two adults and a child, all tax-free. This figure is an estimate, but it does explain why many studies found that, even with an extremely high minimum wage, Ireland's welfare system created vast welfare traps. If some 780,000 Irish people are really living on 203 or less a week, as Cori claims, why wouldn't an average poor person take a minimum-wage job, yielding them 306-340 per average week? Why do Irish employers need to search for workers overseas, if so many able-bodied adults in this country feel deprived of their dignity by the substandard welfare system, as Cori claims?

Like all of Ireland's taxand-spend advocates, Cori is extremely keen on drawing international comparisons to make the case that Ireland needs higher taxes and income equality. One in particular is central to these arguments. In table 2.1, Cori shows that Ireland occupies 19th place (same as Spain) in the EU 25 in terms of the share of national income allocated to social protection programmes.

What is not reflected in these simplistic comparisons is that Ireland has one of the lowest unemployment rates, youngest populations, largest average family size and the second-highest minimum wage in Europe.

All of this points to lower demand for social protection than in countries like Spain or the UK (low minimum wages), Germany or France (older population), Italy or Belgium (higher unemployment rates).

Virtually all countries listed in the table have a percapita income lower than that of Ireland. In fact, for the eurozone average, the per capita GNP was approximately 80% of that in Ireland. This means that our real spending on social protection relative to the EU average income, adjusting for price differentials across the countries, stood at a level comparable with that of Germany (fourth rank) and in excess of that in the UK (ninth rank).

This helps explain why, according to OECD research, the Irish government's after-tax social support transfers to the poor (defined as those in the lowest income quantile) ranks sixth among the 18 wealthiest OECD states for which data was available . . .

well ahead of countries like Denmark, France, Norway and Sweden.

Although this disputes the sensationalist statements made by Cori, this does not suggest that Irish society should be indifferent to the plight of those who truly need help. However, the fact that this evidence was not examined by Cori suggests that, instead of a debate on the issues of poverty, Cori is predominantly concerned with finding new and increasingly exotic options for extracting tax funding for the programmes they advocate.

The current document contains over 180 policy recommendations covering virtually every activity of the Irish society . . . from poverty to immigration, from moral values to international development. Some are good, like the need for keeping low wage earners out of the tax net. Some are designed to please Cori's political allies at the expense of the general public . . . such as introducing environmental taxes, increasing total tax intake and wealth taxes, introducing an EU-wide corporate tax rate at a level well above the one applied in Ireland. Yet many more represent direct advocacy for funding the programmes run by the organisations linked to Cori. Qui bono?

Constantin Gurdgiev is an economist and editor of Business & Finance.