If Irish society were examined through its film, literary and media cultures, apart altogether from religious and legislative mores, a casual observer could only conclude that sex and sexuality Irish-style occupy a narrow range from the cringingly awkward to the downright dysfunctional.
And it's not just a question of how the command to "Brace yourself, Bridget" progressed to the perhaps more sophisticated invitation "Will you come into the field, Bridie?" posed in William Trevor's The Ballroom of Romance.
This weekend's bravura outpouring of sometimes amusing reports wondering whether the anti-impotence treatment Viagra will become the recreational drug of the late 1990s pulses tacitly with the entirely unfunny assertion that pharmacological answers can solve the grittiest aspects of social and cultural ineptitude. That is not just glib, but in a country where drink and sex have a long and tortuous relationship, quite traditionally naive.
Exactly how traditional remains to be seen. With Viagra licensed by the EU last week, and set to be available in Ireland before the anniversary of Eamon de Valera's birthday on October 14th, the State now faces the challenge of identifying a precise policy on whether and how to democratise sexual health for men. Its response will also set future precedent for the female Viagra equivalent which is to start undergoing clinical trials.
In both Britain and Germany health ministers have enabled Viagra to maintain its marketing mystique by refusing to allow its prescription through their respective general medical services. Had they wished to perpetuate the mistaken belief that Viagra is an aphrodisiac, they could hardly have picked a more certain strategy.
The stated reasons for the no-cash-no-pill policy are financial. But the effect is to remind many impotent men that on the measures which seem to most reflect a man's sense of identity - sexual prowess and economic value - they are doubly so.
That sex existed in Eamon de Valera's Ireland is a matter of record, but on some evidence hard to believe. Looking back, the culture is in the position of teenage children who find it difficult to imagine that their own parents ever had sex at all. No positive images of sex or sexuality present themselves from those times, which in practice lasted until at least the early 1970s, when Ireland's membership of the EU began to enable citizens to challenge aspects of restrictive sexual controls for the first time.
If there was sex in de Valera's Ireland, as we must conclude, it was officially a practice entirely divorced from pleasure. Until Ireland joined the EU, the standard response to any means of artificially assisting or encouraging pleasurable sex and sexuality was to either ignore it or ban it out of hand.
Public discussion was forbidden. More Pricks Than Kicks, the 1934 book by Samuel Beckett, was banned on the strength of its title alone, although that came from Jesus's words to St Paul, "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." From then on, Beckett's heroes became the image of the wholly impotent man, short on both sexual prowess and economic power. They went on to help him win the Nobel Prize.
Viagra has won the Pfizer company more free advertising than it could have imagined, yet Viagra is only a treatment, and one with limited application, not an answer to society's dreams. But the debate around sexual dysfunction can stand as metaphor for civic ease and unease; desire frustrated can image a place continually inhibited from realising itself.
In the various games of memory dodgems played by writers, historians and film-makers, the state of the nation is often measured imaginatively as much by its sexual health and prowess as by its political or economic power. The looking-glass picture of sexual discourse that created - apart from blissful exceptions like Joyce, Merriman and a few others - tells of desire denied, of sexuality warped by drink or celibacy or too much child-bearing, and undercut by a sense of failure, anger and, too often, violence. It is within that specific, painful, cultural context that the present debate takes place.
The questions in Ireland are only beginning, and already the debate is losing its focus on the 180,000 men who suffer impotence at some point in their lives, and live with all the psychic and social losses that entails. Yet the most remarkable feature in the debate so far is not the reported maximum potential cost of £20 million to the GMS if Viagra prescriptions are admitted to its scheme, but the news, presented as a virtual arithmetic footnote, that 162,000 men who are impotent are not expected to consult their doctors about the condition. On the evidence so far, they will not be encouraged to do so.
Sexuality is still a sore point in Ireland. Although the culture as we actually live it has moved on, somewhat, the cultural memories we share as a series of communities is almost without exception one of sexual doom and gloom. Ordinary people are now rewriting the story of sexuality Irish-style, yet the version which goes public still owes more to the days of old Ireland, when the country was from most perspectives economically, socially and culturally impotent.
Those old stories remain familiar. We read almost daily of appalling abuse and rape cases, we see Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn renovated by director Conall Morrison as a desperate struggle between individual longing and social conformity; from Kate O'Brien and Neil Jordan to Pat McCabe and Mary Dorcey, harrowing tales of repression track the consequences of unsanctioned desire.
The link in this uniquely Irish chain of being is Mr Brian Cowen, Minister for Health, whose function in the current Viagra debate is uncomfortably close to that of the parish priest at a dancehall in 1950s Ireland. He now has the power to influence who may or may not make love, who may or may not experience human intimacy. And all for the cost of the Government grant to the GAA at Croke Park.
If the Minister decides to adapt a no-pay-no-pill policy, Beckett's worst fears about the mythical impotency drug Bando, expressed in the novel IT]Watt, will resonate uncomfortably, linking past with present with a continuity no one can welcome.
"For the State, taking as usual the law into its own hands, and duly indifferent to the sufferings of thousands of men, and tens of thousands of women, all over the country, has seen fit to place an embargo on this admirable article, from which joy could stream, at a moderate cost, into homes, and other places of rendezvous, now desolate."
Desolate indeed.