Sometimes living in the city centre can be very damaging to your social conscience. As I walk down O'Connell Street, through Temple Bar and around Trinity College, I am frequently approached by a selection of people who demand my charity:

Homeless boys with drug problems; Romanian gypsy women with ear-ringed babies; singing traveller kids, and most annoying of all, the clipboard chuggers (charity muggers) raising money for every good cause imaginable.

Each time I pass one of these needy individuals I feel a combination of guilt and frustration -- followed by intense irritation.

Guilt, because compared to these people I am as rich as Croesus. (But, I hasten to assure you, still poor relative to my peers).

Frustration, because if I hand out tenners to ease my conscience, I risk impoverishing myself, without much benefit to those who receive my 'on the spot' charity. (This is ineffective freelance philanthropy -- more of which later).

And irritation because sometimes I think; who on earth is responsible for these people? Themselves? Their families? The government? Me?

The question is, am I obligated -- as the political philosopher Peter Singer would argue -- to help my neighbour? Or is benevolence to the less well-off a virtue rather than a duty? Something which is only effective when given freely, without social pressure?

Should I support the paying of greater taxes to the government so that health, welfare and education are properly funded?

Or should I should opt out of the whole tax thing and trust my own judgement so I make sure my cash ends up funding the needy rather than paying for political spin doctors and useless e-voting machines?

(Of course, this argument is pretty much academic as I -- unlike Bono -- am a long way off having the funds to either avoid tax and/or have George Bush answer my calls about Third World Debt).

Meanwhile, here in Dublin's inner city, Irish philanthropists contributed €6m to fund early learning initiatives for local children.

I grew up in an era when public monies were expected to pay for this sort of thing. Public monies to which I -- and most other people -- contributed. By electing representatives, we had a say in where these monies went, furthermore, while the beneficiaries never felt they were receiving someone else's personal charity -- or all of the baggage that goes with receiving such 'gifts' from others.

But today, the bottom line is that -- for whatever reasons -- be they genuinely ideological or just pure greedy, we are becoming dependent on the kindness of strangers to provide what the traditional Welfare State used to do.

As we become a low tax economy, private charity is increasingly being asked to fill the gap between the haves and the have-nots. While I fully support the rich giving to the poor, questions have to asked about how effective private philanthropy really is?

As Chuck Feeney, or Bill and Melinda Gates can tell you, giving away money responsibly can be a very tricky business.

A government dispensing public funds has to stick pretty much to the wishes of the electorate or they'll find themselves booted out come the next election, but no such strictures apply to rich philanthropists. You just have to hope that they are as wise as they are wealthy.

Many critics assert that private charities impose the desires of the rich onto social 'priorities'. And a priority for an egotistical multi-millionaire may not coincide with the wants of those in need.

As billionaire investor and philanthropist William H Gross noted in an interview with the New York Times: "A $30m gift to a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation".

So, what of the many benefactors who seem to gain an immense amount of social cachet and publicity when they throw a few spare million to the 'needy' or organise a sumptuous ball 'in aid' of the deserving charity of their choice?

Is it right that people should want a social return on any charitable investment they may choose to make?

Well, if we believe that giving is a virtue rather than a duty, why shouldn't they be congratulated publicly for their donations to a favourite charity? It's their money and consequently they have the right to do with it what they please, haven't they?

Last year, Warren Buffet made headlines when he donated $31bn to the Gates Foundation. He felt obligated to make such a contribution, he said, as he believes that society is responsible for much of his wealth:

"If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil."

Similarly, Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon calculated that "social capital" was responsible for 90 per cent of what people earn in wealthy societies like the US and Europe.

So, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this piece, it seems that yes, we do have a duty to redistribute some of our wealth to those who are less well off, but the most important point is not how much we decide is fair to give -- but how we choose to give it.

Freelance philanthropy can be worse than useless. Wanting to personally choose how the 'poor' benefit from your charity can become one big exercise in ego gratification.

Though we may enjoy the charity balls, golf-classics and the sponsored champagne lunches, let's not kid ourselves that we are organising these events in order to assuage world inequality. We do it because it makes us feel good.

If we genuinely wanted to help others we would either persuade our government to allocate more public monies to the less well-off (as Liz O'Donnell attempted) or just quietly write a cheque to an NGO which has demonstrated its effectiveness (John O'Shea's Goal seems to lead the field there).

In the real world, charity work is usually best left to the professionals.