In the puritanical 1940s, Ireland banned two Irish classics - Frank O'Connor's The Midnight Court, a translation of the Gaelic sexual satire of Brian Merriman, and The Tailor and Ansty, Eric Cross's account of an earthy rural couple, as indecent and obscene. What was so shocking about these books? How did the frank and amused attitude to sex of the Gaelic past become the puritanism of the new Irish state? And is today's sexual freedom a liberation or a plunge into decadence?