This political remark provoked a whole, furious speech about sexual morality. 'Hillary and all the affairs that lying woman has had, ' took up most of his tirade because Hillary, of course, is a threat to the Republican party. As far as I've heard there's not the slightest evidence that Hillary ever had an affair, but accuracy is the first casualty of ideological conviction.

And there's no denying that they've got the goods on Bill.

"Was that a good example Bill Clinton gave?" the man demanded to know. "To teach the youth of America that there's nothing wrong with oral sex?"

Well, as discussions about oral sex with a half-naked man go, this one wasn't the greatest. I didn't dare tell him that there's a statue of Bill Clinton in Ballybunion put up to commemorate his visit and that the teenage girls who hang around it are known locally as 'the Monicas'. But I couldn't help mentally comparing the good humour of that to the man's rage. And to thinking how earnestly political opponents in America look for the 'dirt' on each other in the almost-certain hope that the electorate will feel alienated from almost any candidate who isn't heterosexual and married with children. What's more, married in a specific me-little-woman-looking-upthrough-my-eyelashes-at-you-big-strongman way. Nancy Reagan is the template;

not Teresa Heinz Kerry.

I'd been wondering, too, about the role of sexual behaviour in the unbuttoned conversations between the Fianna F�il bigwigs about which individuals outside their own party they can trust to last the life of a coalition government. To read the papers you'd think that soundings and papers exchanged and positions explored on such things as rates of corporation tax were where the negotiations to form a government are at. And there surely are points on which some of the small parties have immoveable, core beliefs. But on the whole, I imagine that a matter of major importance to the coalition makers are issues the public never gets to hear about, expressed in statements like 'I'm not having that b******s next or near me'; or 'the wife says he's due to go in to John of God's' or 'the Revenue are looking for him/her to have a long and serious talk'. What such-andsuch a TD is like as an individual and how vulnerable they are to disappearing or being disappeared is a good deal more important when it comes to resting a government on them than their views on the carbon footprint.

Does what we might call an irregular private life constitute a risk factor in Irish political life? Compared, say, to having a pending criminal conviction or a serious drink problem or a strikingly bizarre personality? It seems not. Once upon a time the bishops could add themselves to the mixture that brought down Parnell through his love for Mrs O'Shea, but the bishops don't step so confidently into the public arena today - at least, not in Ireland.

Their unworthy heirs are the English tabloid newspapers who habitually proclaim themselves the guardians of what might at a stretch be called morality. They pretend to a stance of lower-middle-class righteousness so as to bring in the punters with stories of deviations from it. The aim is to use as much titillating material as possible.

No outsider ever knows what the real story is, and if there's a wife, how the wife is feeling about whatever is going on. But an Irish outsider assumes there's some kind of domestic arrangement in place and what's more, doesn't want to know if in fact there is not, because this is not a society that stands up for wives. Any male TD could go on holiday with Paris Hilton as long as he didn't miss an important county game to do it.

I saw a photo another time of a very crosslooking woman who was alleged to be Celia Larkin's successor in Bertie's life - a photo that stopped me in my tracks because she seemed to be smoking, and in parts of the first world that's far worse a drawback electorally than if she was a crossdressing, dominatrix lapdancer with an advanced cocaine habit. But no matter what his female friends do or don't do, the extraordinary fact is that it won't make the slightest difference to Bertie's kingpin position in Ireland. The English paparazzi needn't bother camping on his doorstep.

All in all, then, the coming coalition won't be vulnerable to a member being forced to resign on a point of personal honour, including honour in the arrangments for their sexual life (if any). There are a few objective situations which might take a TD out - Beverley Cooper Flynn will have to pay her debts, for example. But in Irish coalitions - the same as, in Benjamin Franklin's opinion, in life as a whole - there is nothing to fear but death and taxes.