Here are a few more thoughts on that sex, sin and society poll in The Irish Times. Yesterday the paper ran part two of the poll and one question asked respondents to rank in order of personal disapproval eleven types of behaviour that all the major religions regard as sinful.

Number one was ‘lying under oath’, which 56pc of respondents regarded as the worst sin, followed by financial fraud (55pc), drink driving (48pc), ‘significant’ tax evasion (40pc) down to the likes of sexual infidelity (18pc) and having casual sex without using contraception or protection (12pc).

Frankly, I don’t believe for one instant that people really mean any of this. The chance that someone lying under oath could ever directly affect your life is extremely small. The chance that you will be a victim of infidelity some day is a lot higher (although not that high, thankfully!).

If you found that your spouse had slept with someone else, you would very quickly find infidelity rising straight to the top of that list.

Respondents gave the answers they did because they have been conditioned by the media to consider so-called public morality like lying under oath as more serious than so-called private or personal morality like infidelity or casual sex.

But by definition it is ‘personal morality’ that impacts much more decisively on our lives precisely because it is personal. The morality of those we live with and work with matters most of all day to day.

We think we believe that personal morality is no-one’s business but our own just in case society starts to interfere with our life-style choices.

We can clearly see that something like drink-driving is not simply personal morality because when someone drinks and drives someone else can get hurt.

But we have to be extremely blind, or brain-washed, to think no-one gets hurt when a spouse breaks their marriage vows. There are few moral acts that are truly private and it is truly silly to think that sexual morality is purely private.