For the first time, the perennial Irish question - where are we now? - finally has a clear answer: on the mobile phone in the car, heading from the gym to the pub, without stopping at the church.
A new report, Irish Lifestyles: The Rise of the Immoral Majority, from the marketing research company Mintel tells us that "owning a flash car and a mobile phone, being a member of a private health club and having a home computer are the new symbols of Irish success on both sides of the Border, while the traditional values of a successful marriage, children, financial security and regular Sunday worship have all taken a back seat in many households" .
Going to church is ranked as far less important by most people surveyed in the Republic than watching TV, going on holidays and sitting in the pub. If you want further proof, there was the launch of the self-proclaimed "Ireland's hottest newspaper" Stars on Sunday, with more mugshots than the FBI and not a single line of news.
It seems that the pessimism of Irish conservatives has been vindicated. Repression has been replaced, not with freedom, but with a new kind of enslavement to consumerism and celebrity.
If anything, the title of the Mintel report is rather too complimentary. We do not have an immoral majority. Immorality requires effort. What we have is more like an amoral majority, a culture whose characteristic gesture is the shrug of the shoulders. Style matters more than substance and style is morally neutral. It is not a matter of right and wrong, but of cool and uncool.
So were people like me wrong to ignore the warnings of the bishops and argue for liberal change? Have we merely created a valueless society in which the baby of collective responsibility has been thrown out with the bathwater of sour old dogma?
Before we go running back into the arms of mother church, pleading for forgiveness and sanctuary, let's remember a few things.
Firstly, the paradigm of a shift from morality to immorality is simply wrong. We were never all that moral in the first place. It is undoubtedly true that Irish people 20 years ago did show unusually strong disapproval of some kinds of sexual or reproductive behaviour.
The Irish section of the European Value Systems Study, for which surveys were conducted in 1981, showed that Irish people in general were less tolerant of abortion, divorce, homosexuality, prostitution and under-age sex than their European counterparts.
It is not however at all clear that this made us more moral. Is it, for example, more moral to discriminate against gay men and lesbians than it is to respect them as equal citizens?
And in any case the Irish of 1981 were significantly less moral than some of their fellow Europeans when it came to some issues unrelated to sex. People in the Republic, for example, were a good deal less likely to disapprove of claiming social welfare benefits to which you are not entitled than those in Northern Ireland or Britain.
Most significantly, our alleged saintliness did not extend to tax evasion. On a range of one to 10, where one meant that a certain kind of behaviour was never justified and 10 that it was always justified, cheating on your taxes scored 2.64 in Europe as a whole. In Ireland, the score was 3.35.
Nor is it at all obvious that people 20 years ago were not materialistic. One of the funniest findings of the 1981 survey, for example, was that people in the Republic disapproved more strongly of stealing your neighbour's car than of stealing his or her spouse. This hardly suggests that the fetish for flash cars displayed in the Mintel report is an entirely new phenomenon.
The other thing that has to be borne in mind is that the legal and constitutional changes of the last 20 years - the so-called liberal agenda - are a reflection, not a cause, of changed behaviour.
Conservative Ireland was a failed experiment in prohibition. Just as the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1930s didn't stop people drinking, the apparatus of legal repression didn't stop Irish people doing things they weren't supposed to.
Gay culture thrived even while the law threatened a sentence of life imprisonment for male homosexual activity.
Marriages broke down and second unions were formed even while divorce was unconstitutional.
As we know, Irish abortion rates have matched those in Holland even though abortion is illegal here.
The real problem is not that a failed system of repression has been abandoned but that we still lack the public morality that has always been absent. The hope of at least some of us was that by clearing away the detritus of a failed project of moral protectionism we might get to a point where we would actually talk about social morality.
In small ways, that has happened. Issues like corruption, dishonesty, bribery and tax evasion are on the public agenda for the first time.
But there is no wider framework of social ethics, no deeply-rooted concern for generosity, solidarity and equality.
The crux of this failure is political. The major political parties have failed to articulate a notion of public morality, leaving the citizenry in that vacuum between the gym and the pub.
Is it hopelessly naive to think that the general election might be a good moment to start?