The Eircom a.g.m. made for wonderful theatre, with seething throngs of angry shareholders determined to make a point, but resigned to the fact that any protest would be purely symbolic.
This meeting was the equivalent of a large therapy session, where shareholders were allowed to vent their anger. Then they were patted on the head and sent home with the relentlessly cheerful Whitney Houston song, Your Love Is My Love, ringing in their ears like a bad dose of tinnitus.
Of course, the irony of it all is that had the shares delivered all they had promised, Mary O'Rourke would be en route to beatification, and Alfie Kane would be in line for president. Maybe the Eircom shares debacle did us a favour, allowing us to examine the values we all seemed to embrace in July 1999.
By the way, I did not buy any shares, more out of a dislike of the dishonesty of the hype than the result of any great level of moral reflection.
The launch of the Telecom shares was billed as some kind of watershed, a move from State ownership to a share-owning public.
A new model of collective ownership was being born. Instead of being vested in public ownership by virtue of being State-owned, the company would somehow be vested in public ownership by the fact that all of us could afford a little piece of it, and would get richer as a result. This nonsense was presided over by the Government and colluded in by most of the media.
It was an extremely cynical exercise, because it was those least used to the vagaries of shares who would be most likely to be suckered. In other words, the small shareholder. And so it proved.
It is impossible not to feel sorry for people like the pensioner who invested in order to secure his savings for his funeral, or the poor devils who borrowed to finance share purchase.
But the fact is that the massive advertising campaign played to people's weakness - their desire to get money for jam. Acquisitiveness was enshrined as a great new virtue in Irish society, as a wondrous bonding experience available right through the levels of society. We were all entitled to benefit from the launch of Telecom, because, after all, wasn't it ours to start with?
The crookedness of this thinking has only been revealed because it all went wrong. Launching Telecom on the market could never have ushered in some great new era of equality, where we would all somehow be newly enfranchised by playing the markets. This was never going to be an exercise in egalitarianism.
People are complaining that the banks queued up to throw money at people who wanted to borrow to buy shares. It should be patently clear by now that banks are not charitable institutions. They are not really interested in the small customer.
Equally, there are moans that the large financial institutions ganged up to crush the small shareholders' complaints at the Eircom a.g.m. The only question is: why is anyone surprised?
This may sound as if I am deeply nostalgic for the old model of State or semi-state ownership of key services. Sadly, I'm not. I remember vividly in the 1980s friends of mine holding a party to celebrate the fact that they finally got their telephone installed on the 10th anniversary of their initial application for the phone.
Few would disagree with the idea that semi-state or State ownership encouraged an often inexcusable degree of inertia and inefficiency. But it was disingenuous in the extreme to trumpet the move to more naked market capitalism as somehow a more equitable situation where everyone could be a winner.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect is how little debate there has been about the values which now drive our economy. The Eircom situation showed anyone who had forgotten that it is the small people who lose when things go wrong in the market.
Inflation is busy teaching us the same lesson. But, until personally affected, many of us prefer to ignore the fact that the model of economics under which we now operate accepts that some people will always and inevitably be outside the loop and will never benefit.
Take just one example. The lowering of the unemployment figures is wonderful, but so much more is needed. Imagine if when you went for a fill of petrol you were charged for a full tank, but you really got five litres short of a full tank. Wouldn't you question the definition of full?
We accept without question the idea that we now have full employment, but what exactly does that mean?
Full employment is a technical term which accepts there will be a certain degree of frictional unemployment, that is people moving between jobs, but also three to four per cent true unemployment. This sounds very little until you translate it into real people's lives.
At the moment our rate of unemployment stands at 4.3 per cent, or 74,900 people, which includes 27,400 long-term unemployed. That's what full employment means - 27,400 people who are expendable, along with their dependants; 27,400 inevitable casualties of a booming economy.
The more the term "full employment" is bandied about, the less incentive there is to really include everyone in the benefits of this alleged boom. Not to mention the fact that, using different methods of measuring, the true level of unemployment is closer to 8.4 per cent than 4.3 per cent.
The 4.3 per cent figure does not include those somewhat esoterically described as "marginally attached to the labour force". In more mundane terms, these are the utterly discouraged, the ones who have given up hope of finding work.
Also, high employment figures totally mask those stuck in exploitative or dead-end work; those who have exchanged poverty at the State's expense for poverty in low-paid work.
Full employment is a weasel phrase unless it means exactly what it seems to - everyone who wishes to work outside the home having a worthwhile job.
Without highly targeted initiatives in education and programmes specifically designed to help the long-term unemployed secure jobs with a degree of dignity, we stand indicted of shrugging at the plight of the poorest.
The price was too high. That was Mr Alfie Kane's belated evaluation of the Telecom share launch price. But if we are not careful, that could be the epitaph of this whole boom era. The price was too high, because too many little people were considered expendable.
bobrien@irish-times.ie