‘Why are those pipes sticking out of the wall like that?’ said the bathroom fitter, surveying the work the plumber had done.

He stood musing over the way the tubing poked through a stud wall at an upwards angle so you couldn’t attach it to a sink unless you bent it round and then he said: ‘Hmm, they do sometimes do that here. I’m sure it will be fine.’ The bathroom fitter is English, the plumber Irish. Who’s to say which one of them is right when it comes to the exact angle that new pipes ought to come through a wall?

There was a kind of majesty in how the Irish threw all their toys out of the pram

All we know for sure is this: we’ve got to the stage with it where we don’t care if the plumber puts the boiler in upside down, and the pipes back to front or inside out; we cannot argue with the Irish any more. He can install our new heating system his way, and we will be more than happy.

There isn’t anything in Ireland you can argue with, not really, and I absolutely love the Irish for that.

If you think you can argue with anyone and get your way, well then you’ve never tried to argue with the Irish.

This is why when Leo Varadkar asked them the other week in a referendum if they wanted to get rid of the word ‘mother’ from the constitution and make a nice new, modern definition of family that can mean anything, the answer came back a resounding: ‘Feck off!’

It was such a big No vote, to two proposed changes that were pretty mild compared with what’s being done in other countries, that there was a kind of majesty in how the Irish threw all their toys out of the pram, prompting Varadkar’s resignation.

The phrase to be removed was ‘Mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’. And family was to cease meaning marriage but ‘marriage or other durable relationships’.

We were all told how to vote at Mass, when a statement from the Irish Catholic Bishop’s conference was read out by priests. I wasn’t in church that Sunday, I was in England for a few weeks. I don’t think I have a vote here yet anyway. I haven’t looked into it since I moved here because I can’t face
the admin.

But at some point I hope I can join in with their brilliant belligerence.

The Irish are not going for this new agenda. Oh, they have solar panels everywhere and they milked the EU subsidies until the pips squeaked. But if you ask around to find an Irish person to agree with unlimited immigration, widespread multiculturalism, men becoming women or deeming mother an offensive term, it’s nigh-on impossible to find a single one to say yes to any of that. Not in rural Ireland anyway, and rural Ireland is most of Ireland.

I suspect the urbanites in Dublin accounted for the couple of hundred thousand Yes votes in the referendum on family and care giving. But it was more than one million No votes to both proposed changes, 67 per cent and 73 per cent, in the country overall. In Donegal, the No vote in both cases was more than 80 per cent. In Cork where we live, more than 60 per cent voted No. No, you will not take the word mother away from us. Good for them.

So here sits in the EU this respected, long-suffering and deserving country, a country that by no means can be judged to be nasty or narrow-minded or prejudiced, a country that has welcomed every kind of hippie and blow-in, a country that has produced every kind of pioneer, playwright and poet, a country with a gay prime minister from an ethnic minority, and yet when this prime minister told them they had to change their constitution to a fancy new wording in order to be seen as fair and open and egalitarian, even though they are already, they said: ‘No, I don’t think so. We quite like the words mother and marriage, thank you very much.’

What are we to make of that? I’d say we have to assume the Irish might have a point.

Having lived among them, I can say they are the best kind of people you would ever hope to meet. They just do things their own way, and because it works for them, they don’t see why they should change.

The pipes are going in at jaunty angles in this old house of ours, and the plumber is marching about with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and every now and then he shouts at me and the builder boyfriend about a plan he’s come up with. ‘Listen lads!’ he announces. ‘This is how it’s gonna be!’/>