Mr Ahern knows all about selfishness and greed, having spent an important part of his political career funding Charles Haughey's corrupt lifestyle by issuing him with blank, signed cheques. The Moriarty tribunal, it seems, has come to a viewpoint on this, which is not favourable to the taoiseach, and we'll get to hear more about that very soon. The general election will then tell us whether Irish people are happy with the image of their prime minister as a kind of lackey of turpitude, a hapless Baldrick to Charles Haughey's cunning Blackadder.

I'm sure that Mr Ahern does his fair share of voluntary work.

For example, he never gets paid for opening all those pubs. He may have concluded, therefore, that he was just the person to tell us all how disappointed he is in us for failing in our duties towards our local communities. To the taoiseach's way of thinking, it seems we have become so obsessed with our new wealth that we have forgotten that we have neighbours, that we have communities, that we live in a land where many people are worse off than ourselves, and that sometimes we have duties and responsibilities to those people. It's a kind of vaguely leftie, wishy washy kind of view that you'd expect from somebody who recently converted to socialism without reading up on what that actually meant.

The first issue that arises from the taoiseach's remarks is whether we are as wealthy as he seems to think we are, a contention on which he is out of step with most of the rest of us. By far the most striking response in last week's opinion poll in this newspaper was to a question about how Irish people perceived their personal wealth relative to 1997 when PD/Fianna Fail came to power. For all of that time, we have had to listen to treatise after treatise and boast after boast about the Celtic Tiger and an economic boom that is apparently the envy of the world.

But yet, when asked about this, Irish people refuse to believe the propaganda. The poll showed that well over 60% of us feel that we are not better off as a result of all this economic activity. There is as yet no figure available about how many of the people who do feel richer attribute this increase in wealth to PD/Fianna Fail.

Let us for the sake of argument accept the premise of the taoiseach's remarks: that most of us are so busy riding the Tiger that we don't have time to volunteer, help out and become active citizens. One response to this was implied in the remarks of Mary Davis, the chairwoman of the new taskforce, at its first meeting during the week.

"I firmly believe there is a latent desire in every individual to help, " she said. "For the work I've been doing with the Special Olympics over the last 30 years, no one has ever refused to help when they were asked.

People do want to help and get involved. It gets clouded a bit and you can understand why, due to the busy lives we lead. It's not high up on our radar."

Precisely. The reason fewer people are volunteering isn't because they don't want to, or because they're buying Hermes bags in Brown Thomas, or sipping cocktails in their new Algarve homes.

It's because they're too busy, because the difficulties of living in Ireland today . . . the four-hour commutes, the shocking lack of childcare, one of the longest working weeks in Europe, some of the shortest holidays . . . mean that by week's end, by day's end, we are so flaked out that spending even an hour helping out somewhere else is one effort too far.

This isn't a selfish response or a materialistic response. It's a natural human response to living in a country that often seems as though it has been designed by masochists and run by lunatics. The taoiseach might think that we are much too fond of the few extra euro in our pockets, too addicted to complaining about the poor infrastructure or the lack of facilities or the hopeless health service or the growing inflation rate, but in the real world that most of us live in, these things matter. When Bertie Ahern lived in that world some years ago, he could have articulated those concerns very well. Now he is simply reduced to chastising us for our inability to multitask and criticising us for our selfishness.

And it's not as if nobody is volunteering anymore. According to Mary Davis, there are between 1,200 and 1,500 voluntary organisations in south Dublin alone. When she presented community awards in Kerry a few years ago, 580 groups were involved. Look at our response to charity appeals after one of the growing number of worldwide disasters. We are natural givers.

Somewhere along the way, however, the taoiseach has identified his people as selfish and materialistic and suggests that we are poorer as a result. We're poorer alright. Poorer for having a millionaire taoiseach lecturing us on our selfishness and poorer for having somebody in charge who appears to begrudge us whatever extra wealth we have.

Perhaps next summer, Mr Ahern will get his response.

ddoyle@tribune. ie