Dear minister,

Not being permitted proximity to your ear – unlike certain of our fabulously rich fellow citizens – will you please spare a few minutes to consider the needs of the many hard-pressed individuals in this republic who go un-feted and, often, unheard?

On learning that the wealthy financier Derek Quinlan had been privately counselling you and the taoiseach to introduce incentives in the budget to resuscitate the property market, we thought we too would ask for an audience before Tuesday, but the lady who answered the phone in your department could hardly curtail her disbelieving mirth upon hearing our request. Later, a gentleman phoned back to explain that, while your appointments diary would not be revealed to us and, besides, he was not aware that you had met Mr Quinlan on the department's premises, you "meet vast numbers of people in everyday life in the constituency, at events and on an ongoing basis in [your] office."

I wonder have you, by any chance, met David on your rounds? He lives in desirable Temple Bar, sleeping at night in the doorway of an interiors shop frequently name-checked in the glossy style bibles. One night while he was sleeping, some teenagers came and jumped up and down on him for a laugh. David is 38. He grew up in the countryside, completed school, sat his City & Guilds in carpentry followed by an apprenticeship, and worked in Germany for six years, where he learned to speak the language fluently, before coming home to coin it in the building boom.

In the sittingroom in Trust's drop-in centre beside the Iveagh Hostel, after a shower and a shave and having changed into clean clothes, David volunteered to talk to me. He said his sister, who had been regularly hospitalised for bipolar depression throughout her life, had fatally jumped from one of the Ballymun towers. Four weeks after her funeral, David's father died. The official cause of his death was septicaemia but his son knows it was a broken heart that killed him, 10 years after David's mother's death. All the time he talked, the tears in his eyes never fell. He said he went on working after his father died. He had a job with a scaffolding company and was taking home a thousand euro a week, clear. Then the work dried up. The cranes started vanishing from the skyline. He signed on for €197.80-a-week job seeker's allowance. He felt utterly alone.

He began drinking. As soon as the off-licences open every morning at 10.30, he is first in to buy six cans for €7. He gets depressed. He took heroin, a thing he said he would never do. He went cold turkey to get off it, curled up with excruciating abdominal pains in bed in a €4.50-a-night dormitory hostel. David knows, minister, that you are bringing in the budget on Tuesday. He asks you for one thing. Could he have somewhere to call home? "If I can't get that, I can't get a job," he reasons.

It's true there are 43,000 families on the national waiting list for homes but it is also true that, according to the last population census, there were 216,535 empty homes dotted around the country, not to mention all the unsold new estates built in the dying days of the Celtic Tiger. The fact that about 15% of the total housing stock lies permanently vacant is at least partly the fault of investors, developers, speculators and the bankers who facilitate them. Perhaps, minister, you could require those who gained so handsomely from the years of prosperity to give something back to those who gained nothing at all by putting a roof over their heads. After all, they do insist you must be radical on Tuesday. How radical would it be if, say, the 1,200 taxpayers who earn more than €1m-per-annum were to, as they like to put it, go that extra mile for their country?

On Meltdown Monday, the day the €485bn state guarantee scheme was hatched for the banks, you had former OPW minister Tom Parlon in your office, leading a delegation from the Construction Industry Federation and, that night, the chairmen and chief executives of the country's two main banks were ushered into Government Buildings for an Apocalypse Now meeting. Later, Seán Fitzpatrick, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, disclosed that he too had met you. Frankly, minister, it is this €430,000-salaried employee of the country's third-biggest bank who finally made us put pen to paper. Anglo Irish Bank made a virtue from lending to high-risk property developers and, when the entire house of cards started trembling, the banks came with their begging bowls to the exchequer. Just days after being rescued from possible oblivion, Mr Fitzpatrick was invited to address a conference. What did he say? Thank you? Sorry? Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? No, he said none of that. What he said was that you, minister, should abolish universal state pensions, children's allowance and medical cards for people aged over 70 and, instead, you must reduce corporation tax.

While nobody ever went to the marketplace to find good manners and high morals, the attitude exhibited by Mr Fitzpatrick and his ilk is in stark contrast to the fortunes of many other citizens. Some of them had their fate sealed in the High Court last week when 46 applications were made by lending institutions for the repossession of houses. And these are merely the cases on record. The St Vincent de Paul, which has registered an increase of more than 40% in calls for assistance in Dublin, says there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that people are going to their mortgage lenders and handing over the house keys. Meanwhile, MABS (Money Advice & Budgeting Services) is giving out so much money to help tide people over they have nothing left to spend on vital education.

Don't you think it odd that the merchant princes of capitalism lecture those they deride as state spongers but, as soon as the chill wind blows under their own door, they embrace the ethos of socialism as enthusiastically as anyone? On one hand, they want you to discard equitable state pensions based on the principle that all the citizens are equal. On the other hand, they want you to prop up their banks. It is neither here nor there in their calculations that Ireland records a 21% increase in winter deaths every year, compared to 11% in Finland, that 470,000 people aged over 65 have no other income apart from the state pension (€223.30-a-week contributory) and that 121,000 elderly pensioners live alone. If means-testing were introduced, 89% of applicants would still qualify but many of the remaining 11% would fall into the cracks along the border line and all for what? A minuscule saving.

Dependency on state welfare is seldom a lifestyle choice. For Mr X, who does not want to be named, minister, because of the stigma of unemployment, it came out of the blue after 33 years working as a fitter for Donnelly Magna, a US subsidiary that used to make car mirrors in Co Kildare. The company let its 350-strong workforce go nearly two years ago, before anybody realised we were heading for recession, and relocated to the Czech Republic. Mr X and his two sons lost their jobs. Overnight, the family of six was reduced to living on his €329-a-week unemployment benefit. Very quickly, the redundancy money was subventing the family's day-to-day expenses. One of the first outlays was €2,000 on health insurance to replace the work scheme Mr X and his sons had enjoyed with Donnelly Magna.

It might interest you to know that the state agency charged with helping people like Mr X get back on track did sweet damn all for him. He went to his local Fás office to make enquiries. He was rewarded for his troubles with a leaflet stuffed into his hand and an exhortation to go home and check out the agency's website. As we inch ever closer to budget day, one of the loudest predictions has been that various state quangos, such as the Combat Poverty Agency, the Human Rights Commission and the Equality Authority, will, as we know them, be disbanded. Perhaps, the ones that survive, like Fás, should be called to account, along with the government ministers and senior civil servants who squandered taxpayers' money during the good times on the follies of electronic voting (€60m), the Ppars payroll system (€231m) and the 216 garda vehicles costing €3.8m that were left in cold storage for nearly two years.

Rutherford Birchard Hayes, a former US president, declared of his own country in the 19th century: "This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations." Doesn't it sound disturbingly familiar?

Good luck on Tuesday, minister. We all need it.

Justine McCarthy